The AP projects that Tea Party star Ted Cruz will win the Texas Republican Senate primary, defeating "establishment" candidate and longtime Lieutenant Gov. David Dewhurst.
In the past several weeks victory for Cruz, the former solicitor general, had begun to look increasingly likely, with polls showing him ahead of Dewhurst, and major national Tea Party stars like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint turning out to campaign for him in the final days leading up to the runoff. However, for the bulk of the race Cruz had been the underdog, lacking in the wealth and name recognition enjoyed by Dewhurst, who has been the lieutenant governor under Rick Perry since 2003.
While Cruz, 41, may have had the majority of national star power on his side, Dewhurst, 66, had the backing of many in the Texas political establishment, including Perry. Dewhurst enjoyed a huge financial advantage over Cruz. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Dewhurst poured $11 million of his own personal fortune- he founded a successful energy company called Falcon Seaboard- into his campaign, spending a total of $19 million, as compared to Cruz's $7 million spent. But ultimately Dewhurst's wallet was no match for Cruz's political prowess.
Cruz painted his opponent as a moderate who would be willing, if not eager, to compromise with Democrats in Congress. Dewhurst has a very conservative record- he's anti-abortion rights, he supports a balanced budget amendment, and on Monday morning he stopped by a Chick-Fil-A to show his support for the restaurant embroiled in a controversy regarding their president's recent comments on gay marriage. Nevertheless, Cruz and his supporters pointed to compromises Dewhurst had made with Democrats in the state legislature, and argued that his record was merely a reflection of Rick Perry's conservative agenda and did not provide an accurate representation of Dewhurst's own governing style (Hartfield 1-2).
In the November 6 general election, Cruz faced Democratic nominee Paul Sadler, an attorney and a former state representative from Henderson, in east Texas. Cruz won with 4.5 million votes (56.4%) to Sadler's 3.2 million (40.6%). According to a poll by Cruz's pollster Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research, Cruz received 40% of the Hispanic vote, outperforming Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney among Hispanics in Texas (Ted 4).
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz potentially violated ethics rules by failing to publicly disclose his financial relationship with a Caribbean-based holding company during the 2012 campaign, a review of financial disclosure and company documents by TIME shows. The relationship originated with a $6,000 investment Cruz made more than a decade ago in a Jamaican private equity firm founded by his college roommate.
When Cruz later reported the financial relationship in 2013, he failed to comply with Senate rules requiring full identification of the holding company and its location, triggering an inquiry by Senate Select Committee on Ethics staff and a second amended disclosure. After additional inquiries by TIME this week, Cruz said he is now in the process making further corrections to his disclosure (Calibressi 1).
As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.
“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.
But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.
Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.
A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.
Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz’s presidential campaign, Catherine Frazier, acknowledged that the loan from Goldman Sachs, drawn against the value of the Cruzes’ brokerage account, was a source of money for the Senate race. Ms. Frazier added that Mr. Cruz also sold stocks and liquidated savings, but she did not address whether the Citibank loan was used.
The failure to report the Goldman Sachs loan, for as much as $500,000, was “inadvertent,” she said, adding that the campaign would file corrected reports as necessary. Ms. Frazier said there had been no attempt to hide anything (McIntire 1-2).
Hey, Notice Me!
Back in 2013, Cruz -- then a junior member of the Senate’s minority party -- had tried to end funding for the Affordable Care Act. He pushed for language to defund Obamacare in spending bills, which would have forced then-President Barack Obama to choose between keeping the government open and crippling his signature legislative achievement.
As the high-stakes legislative game played out, Obama and his fellow Democrats refused to agree to gut the law, and the Republicans, as a minority party, didn’t have the numbers to force their will. Following a 16-day shutdown, lawmakers voted to fund both the government and the Affordable Care Act.
Cruz was widely identified at the time as the leader of the defunding effort. Most famously, Cruz spoke about defunding Obamacare on the Senate floor during a 21-hour speech, punctuated by Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story for his children.
Many in Cruz’s own party, even those sympathetic with his goals, blamed him for a tactical blunder. During the spending impasse, his Republican colleagues launched "a barrage of hostile questions" at a GOP-only lunch, questioning whether Cruz had thought through the endgame.
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Cruz … [maintained] that his motivation was not to keep the government from being funded, but rather to defund Obamacare, and that the only reason people believe this is because of the biased media (Jacobson 1-2).
Republicans were largely blamed for the shutdown. Cruz’s theatrics inspired the ire not just of Democrats, but of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who felt Cruz knew his self-righteous gambit was doomed to fail, but went ahead with it anyway to raise his own political profile at his party’s expense. … (Kirby 2, 3).
Ted Cruz came to Washington two-and-a-half years ago pledging to be the anti-senator. But he’s been more like the no-show senator.
The Texas Republican seriously lags most of his colleagues in attending hearings and casting votes in what has been a Senate career long on rhetoric and short on Senate business.
He’s skipped the vast majority of Armed Services Committee hearings, is below-average in attendance on his other major committees and ranks 97th during the first three months of this year in showing up for roll call votes on the Senate floor.
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Last month, Cruz dismissed concerns about all the Armed Services Committee hearings he’s missed over the past few months by saying he’s been busy planning a presidential campaign. But a POLITICO review has found that his attendance problems date back to his first few months as a senator in 2013, when he skipped congressional hearings on immigration, the war in Afghanistan and across-the-board spending cuts.
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“Sen. Cruz remains incredibly active on the issues important to the 27 million Texans he represents and takes care to make sure his constituents know where he stands on these matters,” [Cruz’s communications director, Amanda] Carpenter said in a statement. “In a short time, Sen. Cruz has become a leading voice in our debates about commerce, constitutional rights and national security and will continue advocating ways to make Americans more prosperous and free.”
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For Cruz, another priority has been speaking out on conservative causes around the country — a clearly different way to leverage his influence as a senator and, not coincidentally, pump up his name recognition among the kind of activists who can propel a campaign for higher office.
For instance, on March 6, 2014, Cruz was at National Harbor, Md., roaring to an audience of defense-minded conservative voters organized by Breitbart News about U.S. missteps in dealing with Iran, Israel and the bloody civil war in Syria. “What this administration doesn’t understand is that weakness and appeasement only invite military conflict,” he thundered.
Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill that day, other members of the Armed Services Committee were asking tough questions of the top U.S. general in the Middle East, covering violence in Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the “perennial fight against Al-Qaeda,” according to transcripts (Wright 1,2).
Attack Obama, Attack, Attack!
According to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is essentially financing terrorism. And he’s not backing down after the president called his comments “outrageous.”
“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said during a round table Tuesday. “Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”
Cruz has said the remarks before.
On Monday, Obama responded to criticism of the deal. He also addressed Cruz’s comments, and others from members of GOP lawmakers, calling them “outrageous attacks” that crossed the line.
“We’ve had a sitting senator, who also happens to be running for president, suggest that I’m the leading state sponsor of terrorism,” Obama said during a press conference from Ethiopia. “Maybe this is just an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines, but it’s not the kind of leadership that is needed for America right now.”
During the round table, Cruz said Obama had “belittled and attacked” his remarks, and invited the president to debate the merits of the deal.
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“Yesterday, I invited President Obama to participate in a debate, I would be happy to debate him … anywhere in the country in the next 60 days, to discuss the substance of this deal. If he believes that this deal can be defended, I would encourage him to defend it in front of the American people,” Cruz said. “If he’s unwilling to do so, then he can send as his proxy Secretary of State John Kerry because on the merits, this deal is catastrophic for the American people” (Collins 1,2).
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican presidential candidate, argued on Twitter that Justice Antonin Scalia should not be replaced until after the winner of the 2016 presidential election takes office.
“Justice Scalia was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.”
On Facebook, Mr. Cruz hailed Justice Scalia as “a stalwart defender of the Constitution” and an opponent of “judicial activism” who played an important role in upholding the Second Amendment.
“He was an unrelenting defender of religious liberty, free speech, federalism, the constitutional separation of powers, and private property rights,” Mr. Cruz wrote. “All liberty-loving Americans should be in mourning” (Stack 1).
In June 2016, Cruz blamed the Obama administration for the Orlando nightclub shooting, reasoning that it did not track the perpetrator Omar Mateen properly while he was on the terrorist watch-list. Following the terrorist attack on Nice, France, Cruz said in a statement that the country was at risk as a result of the Obama administration having a "willful blindness" to radical Islamists. With the passing of Fidel Castro in November, Cruz charged Obama with celebrating and lionizing Castro in public statements he made addressing the death. On December 28, after Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech defending the U.S.'s decision to allow a U.N. resolution to pass that condemned Israeli settlements "on land meant to be part of a future Palestinian state", Cruz denounced the speech as "disgraceful", and said that history would remember Obama and Kerry as "relentless enemies of Israel". Cruz also accused the Obama administration of having a "radical anti-Israel agenda" (Comments 1).
Battling Trump
From his home at Mar-a-Lago, Donald J. Trump stirred up new controversy this week in the Republican presidential primary — and new alarm among party leaders that the front-runner for the nomination will drive away women from candidates running farther down the ballot in the fall.
All week, Mr. Trump has slowly escalated a war of words on Twitter against Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, his main competition in the Republican race, based on an ad by a “super PAC” started by people who want to stop the New York developer from getting the nomination. The spot featured an old nude photo shoot of Mr. Trump’s wife Melania Trump, a former model, posing on his jet.
Mr. Cruz has no affiliation with the super PAC, and he has denounced the ad. But Mr. Trump has continued to express disbelief. After threatening to “spill the beans” on Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, who suffered a bout of depression years ago, he retweeted a post from someone who made a side-by-side photo comparison of Mrs. Cruz at an unflattering angle, and Mrs. Trump.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cruz repeatedly quoted from the movie “The American President” to defend his wife, as she held an event and faced questions about Mr. Trump’s threats. But that was before Mr. Trump’s Twitter post with the pictures of the two women. And Mr. Cruz had finally had enough.
Calling Mr. Trump a “sniveling coward,” Mr. Cruz told his rival to “leave Heidi the hell alone” (Haberman 1).
Frank Bruni’s Scorn
He spoke out of both sides of his scowl, itching to be the voice of the common man but equally eager to demonstrate what a highfalutin, Harvard-trained intellect he possessed. He wed a populist message to a plummy vocabulary. And while the line separating smart and smart aleck isn’t all that thin or blurry, he never could stay on the winning side of it.
He wore cowboy boots, but his favorites are made of ostrich.
Two peacocks in a pod, he and Trump, and what ghastly plumage they showed on Tuesday.
Trump somehow saw fit to bring up a National Enquirer story linking Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cruz exploded, branding Trump a “pathological liar” and “serial philanderer.” He also brought up an interview from many years ago in which Trump told Howard Stern that his effort to steer clear of sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam.”
Where was this rant six months ago, when the Republican field was crowded and Cruz played footsie with Trump? Back then he was wagering that Trump would fade, and he wanted to be in a friendly position to inherit the billionaire’s supporters.
But by Tuesday, Trump was the main obstacle between Cruz and the Republican presidential nomination, and Cruz has just one true compass: his own advancement.
The nakedness of his vanity and transparency of his ambition were always his biggest problem. He routinely excoriated other politicians for self-centeredness while repeatedly hogging center stage, his remarks interminable — after his Iowa victory, for example, or when he presumptuously introduced Carly Fiorina as his running mate — and his pauses so theatrically drawn out that you could watch the entirety of “The Revenant” during some of them.
He trashed “the establishment” and wore its rejection of him as a badge of honor only until it stopped rejecting him and its help was his best hope to wrest the nomination away from Trump. At that point he did dizzy cartwheels over every prominent endorsement that came his way.
He took great pride in an adversarial relationship with the media, decreeing us irrelevant, until he went in hunt of a fresh excuse for losing to Trump and decided over the last few days that it was all our fault. We didn’t matter and then we did, depending on which estimation flattered him.
He purported to be more high-minded than his peers but pettily mocked Michelle Obama for urging schoolchildren to eat leafy greens. When Heidi Cruz is first lady, he pledged, “French fries are coming back to the cafeteria.” Heidi Cruz is not going to be first lady, so she’ll need some other platform for the promotion of calorie bombs and second chins.
And where in her husband was the humility that a Christian faith as frequently proclaimed as his should encompass? It wasn’t evident when he stormed into the Senate in early 2013, an upstart intent on upstaging the veterans.
There were flickers of it on Tuesday night, as he conceded defeat not just in Indiana but in the presidential contest, announcing that he was suspending his campaign “with a heavy heart.” He articulated gratitude to those Americans — no small number of them — who had buoyed him.
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He left Trump out of his remarks. There were no congratulations. There was no indication of whether he’d publicly back Trump in the months to come. There was nothing to purge the memory of what he’d said earlier Tuesday, when he described Trump as “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.” Yes, we have, and so has he, every day, in the mirror.
That’s why he’ll undoubtedly be back to try for the presidency again. But this bid is moribund. It’s time for Cruz to rest in peevishness (Bruni 2-4).
Works cited:
Bruni, Frank. “Ted Cruz’s Bitter End.” New York Times, May 3, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/opinion/ted-cruzs-bitter-end.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Calibressi, Massimo. “Ted Cruz Failed To Disclose Ties To Caribbean Holding Company.” Time, October 18, 2013. Net. https://swampland.time.com/2013/10/18/ted-cruz-failed-to-disclose-ties-to-jamaican-holding-company/
Collins, Eliza. “Cruz Stands by Calling Obama a Sponsor of Terrorism.” Politico, July 29, 2015. Net. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-calls-barack-obama-sponsor-terrorism-iran-nuclear-deal-120780
“Comments on President Obama.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#U.S._Senate_(2013%E2%80%93present)
Haberman, Maggie. “Arguments Get Personal between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.”
New York Times, March 25, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/25/arguments-get-personal-between-donald-trump-and-ted-cruz/
Hartfield, Elizabeth. “Ted Cruz Wins In Texas GOP Senate Runoff.” ABC News, August 1, 2012. Net. https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/ted-cruz-wins-in-texas-gop-senate-runoff/
Jacobson, Louis. “Ted Cruz Says He's Opposed Shutdowns, but He Hasn't Always.” Politifact, January 22, 2018. Net. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jan/22/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-hes-opposed-shutdowns-he-hasnt-alway/
Kirby, Jen. Ted Cruz, Mascot of the 2013 Shutdown, Says He Has “Consistently Opposed Shutdowns.” Vox, January 22, 2018. Net. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/22/16921166/ted-cruz-2013-shutdownsays-he-has-consistently-opposed-shutdowns
McIntire, Mike. “Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race.” New York Times, January 13, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/politics/ted-cruz-wall-street-loan-senate-bid-2012.html
Stack, Liam. “Ted Cruz Says President Obama Should Not Name Scalia’s Successor.” New York Times, February 13. 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/live/supreme-court-justice-antonin-scalia-dies-at-79/ted-cruz-president-obama-should-not-name-scalias-successor/
“Ted Cruz.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#U.S._Senate_(2013%E2%80%93present)
Wright, Austin. “Ted Cruz the Senator: Heard but Not Seen.” Politico, April 21, 2015. Net. https://web.archive.org/web/20150424002247/http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/ted-cruz-2016-senate-vote-record-117201.html
