From rival to wingman, Ted Cruz boasts of chumminess with Trump as he stumps for re-election

SUGAR LAND — One thing Sen. Ted Cruz isn’t doing as he seeks a second term is running away from the president. Despite a checkered history, the Texan boasts about his access and influence on matters ranging from taxes to the Paris Climate Accord.

“I spent a lot of time urging President Trump to pull out of that deal,” he recounted. “I spent 45 minutes on Air Force One saying, `Mr. President, this is killing jobs and it’s bad for our economy.'”

The day after Trump announced his decision, Cruz continued, “he calls me on my cellphone. He says, 'Well, Ted, I did it, what do you think?’ ... I told him, `Mr. President, everyone who hates you is ticked off and everyone who loves you is thrilled.’”

Midterms almost always punish the party in power. Trump’s low ratings won’t help. Rather than distancing himself, though, Cruz is fully embracing Trump — quite a reversal for someone who this time two years ago was calling Trump a “pathological liar.”

“He’s successfully reinvented himself,” said Pablo Mastrangelo, 41, an engineering contractor from Katy who attended the dinner. “He has no choice. ... They’re not best friends, but Trump is the president. He’s a Republican. Cruz is playing that game as best he can.”

Irritating the establishment was central to Cruz’s first Senate run and 2016 White House bid. His bond with an unconventional president is central to his re-election pitch.

“He has become the confidant who gets the job done for the president of the United States,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told activists in Sugar Land. "He is the go-to guy. He's the guy."

Texas Republicans remember his resistance to explicitly endorsing Trump at the GOP convention, but few still hold it against him.

Cruz should win the primary and face Beto in the fall but I don’t see Beto as having any chance at victory.

Hmm, don't discount the Irishman, with a Hispanic nickname. Have been watching his progression across the state.........and his supporters are fired up and full of hate for Trump.

Will complacent voters, who think a Dem can't win, stay home and let him take the prize?

Will voters who "hate Cruz", because of his campaign against Trump, stay home to "show him" and let a Dem go to Washington to fight Trump?

Based on years past, I would say no, too..........but some of the comments posted on this article tend to make me think otherwise.

Ted Cruz is excellent when he works for us. There is no one more intelligent. But, he may be owned by the Soros/The House of Rothschild elite cabal. But for the Hegelian Dialectic they will allow him some leeway on the Right-—just not enough to sink the Deep State-—THE TRUE PROBLEMS WHICH WILL CONTINUE UNTIL WE RETURN RULE OF LAW!!!!

Without Just Law, civil society will collapse (Cicero)..

Trump needs to dismantle the Leviathan-—the System—the Federal Reserve and eliminate the marxist Income Tax Act——all of it....because it is “null and void”—antithetical to the Constitution. All “laws” and Amendments which were enacted after 1912 are unconstitutional and the Warren Court “laws” and “regulations” have to be truly DUMPED for he implemented the UN (Stalin) Constitution.

We need our Constitution returned as well as a “Free Press”—All MSM “press” is exactly as Solzhenitsyn stated in 78-—it is Pravda......and as
John Swinton 1880 the famous Scottish orator and journalist stated:

“There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with.

Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

With Obama, it appears that there could indeed been an eligibility question. By the way, I didn't claim that "no President has ever been born outside the US".

Somebody mentioned Chester A. Arthur, but I'm not familiar with his case.

In the case of Ted Cruz, there doesn't appear to be any "dual allegiance" issue, and that's one of the reasons I'm so confident that the USSC would unanimously determine Ted Cruz to be eligible for the office of President.

When one must pin one's hopes on a USSC which figures to be staunchly conservative, and rely on Justices like Clarence Thomas to be in a majority that would somehow rule Ted Cruz ineligible, this is simply not a realistic expectation.

To reiterate, I believe that virtually any USSC that you could arbitrarily construct would not consider Ted Cruz ineligible—and that either unanimously or near unanimously. Thus, whimsically hoping for some fantastical scenario where that wouldn't be the case is a purely academic exercise.

Politics is the art of the possible,ad—like it or not—the Supreme Court would rule within that realm—not the boundaries defined by wishful thinking and extreme idealism.

I'm open to any rational argument that could convince me that the Supreme Court—as currently constituted, or as likely to be constituted in the next couple of decades—would rule Ted Cruz ineligible, but I simply don't see a single Justice that I think would support such a ruling—not even a strict constructionist.

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