After law school, Cruz served as a law clerk to J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1995 and Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the United States in 1996. Cruz was the first Hispanic American to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States. Both Judge Luttig and Justice Rehnquist were giants of the conservative legal bench. These prestigious clerkships at the Circuit Court level and U.S. Supreme Court are just about the plummiest any law school graduate could possibly get (Ted 1)
Mr. Cruz, the most ardent death penalty advocate of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s clerks in the 1996 term, became known at the court for his signature writing style. Nearly two decades later, his colleagues recall how Mr. Cruz, who frequently spoke of how his mentor’s father had been killed by a carjacker, often dwelled on the lurid details of murders that other clerks tended to summarize before quickly moving to the legal merits of the case.
“That, I think, was a special interest of his,” said Renée Lerner, then a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said she was impressed with how deeply Mr. Cruz delved into the facts and history of a murder case. “It was unusual for a Supreme Court clerk to do that.”
Other clerks, however, had a less admiring view. In interviews with nearly two dozen of Mr. Cruz’s former colleagues on the court, many of the clerks working in the chambers of liberal justices, but also several from conservative chambers, depicted Mr. Cruz as “obsessed” with capital punishment. …
Melissa Hart, who clerked for one of the liberal justices, John Paul Stevens, said Mr. Cruz’s … writing approach “made a lot of people really angry.”
In Mr. Cruz’s time as a Supreme Court clerk, a coveted step in a legal career that he had meticulously plotted out, he showed his now familiar capacity to infuriate colleagues. He also worked hard to please his boss, delved into the nuances of constitutional law for long, grueling hours and sought to smooth over harsh feelings at clerk happy hours.
But when he left, he was most remembered by his fellow clerks for his fervor for capital punishment cases, a cause that would define his legal career and help him break into politics.
…
Mr. Cruz … clearly loved his time in a workplace rife with ideological differences. In the glass-encased room of the cafeteria where clerks could discuss cases in confidence, he sharpened his arguments. Playing basketball in the building’s “highest court in the land,” he said “my bad” to the colleagues he elbowed wildly on his way to the hoop. He organized a poker game with conservative clerks, and in the courtyard, he participated in the weekly happy hour, with alternating chambers taking on catering duties. (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks impressed with fajitas. Justice Thomas’s clerks did not with cereal.)
Neal Katyal, a clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer who went on to become the principal deputy and later acting solicitor general of the United States under President Obama, said he had befriended Mr. Cruz on their first day at the cafeteria. He said that it was “superfun” debating politics and law with Mr. Cruz, and that they had also hit the library with legal pads together and discussed life, love and “who we wanted to spend our lives with.”
But Mr. Cruz mostly had time for Chief Justice Rehnquist. Mr. Cruz and he played croquet together, and on Thursday mornings, Mr. Cruz struggled through doubles matches with the tennis-loving chief and his two other clerks. (So as not to disappoint his boss, Mr. Cruz had taken lessons before officially starting the job.) (Horowitz 1-3).
After a brief one-year stint as a law firm associate, Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser. Cruz devised strategy and drafted pleadings for the Bush v Gore case during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts (Ted 1).
Once Bush took office, Cruz worked at the Justice Department as an associate deputy attorney general in 2001, but he had developed a reputation as “abrasive” during the campaign and ended up moving to the "unglamorous" position as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission in 2002, a job Cruz saw as "penance" for rubbing people the wrong way on the campaign.
Cruz married Heidi Nelson, whom he met working on the Bush campaign, in 2001 (Levy 1).
“I just don’t like the guy,” Bush has said since. The solicitor general role in his home state of Texas, offered to him by Greg Abbott—then the attorney general of Texas, now the governor—was a political lifeline (Kruse 2).
Cruz then returned to his home state of Texas to serve as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008. As Solicitor General, Cruz was the state’s chief appellate lawyer. He was also the youngest, the first Hispanic, and the longest-serving, solicitor general in Texas history. As Solicitor General, Cruz argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five cases and losing four (Ted 2).
… the five-plus years he served as the solicitor general of Texas remain the most important period in his public résumé. They’re the record he ran on when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012—and they represent significantly more of his working life than the three years he has served so far in the Senate. They're also a prime source of fodder for liberal and moderate critics, should he become the Republican presidential nominee.
A Politico review of Cruz’s record as solicitor general shows he used the role in a new and far more ideological way than his predecessors, taking a relatively low-profile job that had traditionally been used mostly to defend the state government and turning it into a stage for pushing national conservative causes. Cruz argued eight cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court—far more than his predecessors and successors—using each of them to advance a position endorsed by conservative thinkers. He also was the counsel of record on some 70 friend-of-the-court briefs, or amicus briefs, weighing in on cases across the country, … in which Texas had no direct stake, but which similarly offered a chance to argue ideological points.
…
… Cruz’s time as solicitor general built him a powerful allegiance among the conservative donors necessary to launch a national campaign. …
…
When it came to cases that allowed him to argue for things like the forceful application of the death penalty and expressions of religion in the public arena and against things like abortion and gun control, Ho told me, Cruz “was on constant watch for opportunities to press a conservative vision of the Constitution.”
One person with intimate knowledge of the office described Cruz to me as a “show horse.” Others told me Cruz simply was discerning and strategic and had no qualms about delegating…. Cruz, ...compared with his predecessors, ratcheted up the writing of amicus briefs. And of the cases to which he or the more than a dozen attorneys who worked for him had to respond, he tended to prioritize those he felt would have the most impact, the most buzz, the best shot at ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
The first high-profile case along these lines—and often the first on a list that Cruz hits in speeches—was Van Orden v. Perry, one of a handful of key fights around the country over whether a public institution can display the Ten Commandments.
A homeless former lawyer named Thomas Van Orden sued Texas on account of a Ten Commandments monument on the capitol grounds in Austin. His contention was that this was an unconstitutional injection of religion into such a shared public space. Cruz fought him up the chain of courts. After the case, in interviews with reporters, at forums at conservative think tanks and in an appearance in a short documentary about the case made by the law school at Duke, Cruz painted the case as a pivotal battle against godless liberals who seek to rub out what he sees as religion’s rightful role in American culture. He said in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation that Van Orden was “a significant victory from the perspective of keeping away the chisels and sandblasters.” He fretted in the Dallas Morning News about efforts to “read into our Constitution a hostility toward religion.” Besides, he said in the Duke documentary, “nobody is forcing the passerby to confront this. If an individual is offended, don’t look at it.”
When the case went to the Supreme Court in 2005, it was Abbott, not Cruz, who argued on behalf of Texas—even though Cruz had argued in front of the appeals court in New Orleans, and Erwin Chemerinsky, who argued on behalf of Van Orden, told me he had dealt with Cruz almost exclusively throughout the case. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court sided with Texas—with Cruz—saying it was OK to have a Ten Commandments monument on the state’s capitol grounds.
In eight other cases, though, as solicitor general, Cruz gave oral arguments himself at the Supreme Court. Not all of them were wins, but all were chances for Cruz to showcase his particular brand of vigorously argued movement conservatism.
…
In 2004, in Dretke v. Haley, Cruz argued against leniency for a man who had been unjustly sentenced for a series of thefts—basically because the man’s attorney hadn’t objected when he was supposed to. Cruz worried it would set a bad precedent if the Supreme Court essentially let him out. He faced withering skepticism for putting the principle ahead of the case itself. “So a man does 15 years so you can vindicate your legal point in some other case?” Justice Anthony Kennedy said to Cruz. The justices kicked the case back to Texas courts, which ultimately resentenced the man to the time he had already served.
But the case Ted Cruz talks about the most is Medellin v. Texas. In 2005 and again in 2007, Cruz was put in the intriguing position of, in essence, going up against President George W. Bush. The specifics were compelling: Jose Medellin, a Mexican citizen who had grown up in Texas, raped and killed two teenage girls in Houston. His appeal centered on the fact that he hadn’t been given the chance to talk to the Mexican consulate, violating an international treaty. The International Court of Justice ordered a retrial, not just for Medellin but 50 other Mexican citizens with similar situations. Bush, stunning Cruz and others, penned an executive memorandum siding with the court.
Cruz argued in front of the Supreme Court that the president had overreached. The case, he said, was a question of U.S. sovereignty and of the foundational issue of separation of powers. The president, Cruz said, did not have the power to do what he did. No president would. Not in this country. Cruz, in polite understatement, called it “a very curious assertion of presidential power.” …
The court ruled 6-3 for Texas in June 2005. Medellin was executed a little more than three years later.
Cruz had four other oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court. In League of United Latin American Citizens v Perry in 2006, he emphasized the importance of separation of powers in defending a congressional redistricting case that made Texas a friendlier state in which to run for Republicans. In Smith v Texas and Panetti v Quarterman in 2007 and Kennedy v Louisiana in 2008, he argued pro-death-penalty positions in one case in which the defendant was borderline insane, and another in which the defendant had raped but not killed an 8-year-old girl.
The even more telling portion of what he did as solicitor general is the amicus briefs. …
In a brief in Elk Grove v. Newdow, a case out of California, he argued that children in public schools should be able to say the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, citing “the undeniable link between our Nation and her religious foundation.”
In a brief in Lopez v. Gonzales, a case out of South Dakota, he wrote, “Our Nation must secure its borders, especially against convicted felons who enter illegally.”
In a brief in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, a case out of New Hampshire, he stressed the need for parental notification before abortion.
In a brief in Gonzales v. Carhart, a case that came through courts in California, Nebraska and New York, he argued for the defense of a federal law banning the procedure known by critics as "partial-birth abortions" because “they draw a bright line that clearly distinguishes between abortion and infanticide.”
And then there was what he wrote in his brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, the seminal Second Amendment case from 2008, when the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, as opposed to a collective, militia-related right, to have and use guns.
Every year from 2003 to 2007, Cruz was the counsel of record on briefs that won a Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys Generals. He wasn’t the only winner—in 2007, for instance, NAAG gave a Best Brief Award to 17 people—but Cruz was a named winner five years in a row.
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Around then, according to his book, Cruz had a four-hour breakfast with veteran Republican political strategist Karl Rove. “I asked his advice,” Cruz wrote, “on eventually running for office—whether I should stay on longer as solicitor general or go to private practice.” Rove, Cruz said, told him to keep doing what he was doing: “stay on the job as solicitor general, keep building my record, and find opportunities to systematically build political support for a future run.”
When Cruz left the solicitor general position, in 2009, to join the international law firm Morgan Lewis—now Morgan, Lewis & Bockius—Abbott praised him effusively.
…
He began running for attorney general in 2009—a logical next step—but then-Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison didn’t resign her seat to run for governor, as everybody was expecting, which meant certain dominoes didn’t fall, leaving Abbott as attorney general. That left Cruz stuck at Morgan Lewis, which wasn’t the worst, considering he made more than a million dollars a year every year he was there, according to his financial disclosure forms. But still, Ed Burbach, who worked in the office next to Cruz when he was solicitor general, told me, “I don’t think Morgan Lewis was his goal.”
So in 2011, a year in which he made $1,573,543 from Morgan Lewis, he launched a long-shot run for the U.S. Senate, challenging in the Republican primary David Dewhurst, Texas’ well-known lieutenant governor.
That June, in New Orleans, in a Hilton ballroom at the annual Republican Leadership Conference, he made his pitch. He was polling at less than 10 percent. He told the small crowd about his record.
“During the five and a half years I served as solicitor general, over and over again, Texas stood up and led the nation defending conservative principles,” Cruz said. “We defended the Ten Commandments,” he said, not telling them that Abbott had been the one to actually argue in front of the Supreme Court. “We defended the Pledge of Allegiance,” not telling them that what he did was write an amicus brief. “We defended the Second Amendment,” he said, not telling them that what he did in the case, too, was write a brief. “We went to the Supreme Court, and we won,” he kept telling them, and they kept clapping, and the clapping was getting louder. He told them about Medellin. He told them all of this before he talked about his anti-Obamacare stance, before he told them about his family’s history, his father fleeing from Cuba and pursuing the American dream.
Two months later, in South Carolina at the RedState Bloggers Conference, it was the same: “Over and over again Texas stood up …”
“That’s the record I’m running on,” he told 70 people in folding chairs at a candidates forum put on by the Republican Women of Kerr County, Texas, that fall.
He chased down Dewhurst, getting enough votes in the primary to force a runoff. …
And during his run for the U.S. Senate, throughout 2011 and 2012, putting the finishing touches on that bridge from elite legal nerd to right-wing politician, Cruz settled on his two sentences.
“I’m not running as a lawyer,” he said in a radio interview in San Antonio. “I’m running as a fighter” (Kruse 4-15).
Works cited:
Horowitz, Jason. “As Supreme Court Clerk, Ted Cruz Made Death Penalty His Cause.” New York Times, January 20, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/us/politics/as-supreme-court-clerk-ted-cruz-made-death-penalty-his-cause.html
Kruse, Michael. “How Ted Cruz Became Ted Cruz.” Politico, January 5, 2016. Net. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/ted-cruz-supreme-court-conservative-213497/
Levy, Gabrielle. “10 Things You Didn't Know about Ted Cruz.” U.S. News, May 3, 2017. Net. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-05-03/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-ted-cruz
“Ted Cruz’s (Brilliant) Legal Career.” The Reeves Law Group. Net. https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/ted-cruz-legal-career/
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