Tag Archives: Ted Cruz

That settles it; Cruz can run for POTUS

Ted Cruz has done it. He’s released his birth certificate that says, by golly, that he was born in Canada to a Cuban father and an American mother.

The junior U.S. senator from Texas can seek the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2016 if he so chooses.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/317585-ted-cruz-releases-birth-certificate-

I’m glad he got that out of the way.

I also am hoping Cruz’s foes on the left — and you can count yours truly as one of them — do not keep harping on his birthplace as a reason he cannot run the way those on the right have kept doing as it regards the current president of the United States, Barack H. Obama.

Scholars have said that the constitutional clause “natural born citizen” includes those who are born abroad to American parents. Cruz has settled the issue with his birth certificate. President Obama said all along that he was born in the United States to an American mother and a Kenyan father. That didn’t matter to his critics, who kept insisting he was born in Africa.

Forgive my repeating myself, but if Cruz’s explanation about what the Constitution stipulates regarding presidential eligibility is good enough, why would it matter whether Barack Obama was born in Hawaii or in Kenya? He could’ve been born on Mars and would still be eligible to serve — as long as one of his parents was an American.

The president in 2012 released his own birth document that said, yep, he was born in Hawaii. That, too, settled it.

As for Cruz, thanks for coming forward. Now, let’s get on with arguing about issues … eh?

Why not visit Panhandle, Sen. Cruz?

It just occurred to me today, after commenting on Sen. Ted Cruz’s schedule of town hall meetings, that he’s not coming to the core of his support in Texas.

I’m talking about the Panhandle.

Cruz’s itinerary will keep him down state during his meet-and-greet tour. He’ll be talking to politically friendly audiences.

If that’s going to be his modus operandi during the congressional break, then he needs to come to where his support is really — as in really, really — strong. The Panhandle is known to be a hotbed of tea party support for any statewide candidate. Cruz has taken the next important step and actually won a statewide office.

As the junior Republican U.S. senator, he’s made a big name for himself talking tough about shutting down the government and questioning the commitment of real-life Vietnam War heroes, such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, to our national defense. I feel compelled to insert at this point that Cruz has never worn his country’s uniform, let alone in battle — as Kerry and Hagel have done.

So, what say you, Sen. Cruz? Can’t you find some time in your busy schedule to drop in on, say, Amarillo, for some flesh-pressing with those who just think you’re the bee’s knees?

If you come this way, I might even find time to attend your session and when you open the floor up to questions, I might even challenge you to explain why you believe shutting down the federal government is good for the country.

Talk to all Texans, Sen. Cruz

Something struck me as I looked at U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s planned series of town hall meetings across Texas.

He’s going to be speaking to groups friendly to his point of view.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/15/ted-cruz-staging-events-across-texas/

Local Republican women’s groups are hosting him; same for local tea party organizations; an event in Dallas will be put on by the Heritage Foundation; he’ll be talking to a chamber of commerce audience too.

That’s all fine and good. I’m curious, though, as to whether the Republican junior senator from Texas is going to engage individuals in actual debate and discussion over differences they might have in public policy.

I’m going on out a limb here, but I’m quite sure liberal Democratic senators in, say, California or New York don’t spend much time talking to conservative audiences. So the query is posed to them as well.

Cruz was elected by a majority of Texans in 2012 to represent the entire state. I get that Texas leans hard right in its political view. All its statewide elected officials are Republicans; there’s not a Democrat to be found 
 or none on the horizon with a prayer of winning a statewide election. But not every Texan adheres to that world view. A few of us out here lean the other way and do not like the notion, for example, of shutting down the government in order to defund the Affordable Care Act – which Cruz is pushing.

Sen. Cruz also is thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2016, a notion that was noticed by Tanene Allison, spokeswoman for the Texas Democratic Party. “He’s not talking about the issues that matter most to Texans,” Allison told the Texas Tribune. “A movement to try to shut down the government is not on the top of the list of what most Texans want at the moment.”

A more productive town hall series would be to include constituents who aren’t particularly friendly to the fiery conservative. Maybe someone with a different point of view will sneak into one or more of these meetings and actually challenge him. Let’s hope so.

Is Cruz qualified to run for POTUS?

National political media are starting to probe the issue of a possible presidential candidate’s constitutional qualifications.

The target this time is junior U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas.

http://us.cnn.com/2013/08/13/politics/natural-born-president/index.html?sr=sharebar_facebook

Let’s flash back to 2008 when another candidate came under amazing scrutiny. He was then-junior U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Some folks on the right said he couldn’t run for president because, they alleged, he was born in Kenya, homeland of his late father. Obama’s late mother, however, was an American citizen. Sen. Obama had said all along he was born in Hawaii, the 50th state of the U.S., in August 1961. That wasn’t good enough for the critics, who kept harping on his birth.

Eventually, Obama settled it by producing his birth certificate. He was re-elected in November 2012 and the yammering — save for a few crackpots on the far right — has stopped.

Now we have Cruz. The senator indeed was born in Canada. His father is Cuban. His mother is American. Cruz acknowledges he was born north of our border. And that has some folks questioning whether Cruz — who might run for president in 2016 — is qualified under the Constitution.

Article II stipulates that only a “natural born citizen or a “citizen of the United States … shall be eligible for the office of president.” Scholars have interpreted that to mean that Cruz could serve as president, given that his constitutional qualifications were earned at birth by virtue of his mother’s citizenship.

I tend to believe Cruz is qualified under the Constitution to serve as president, which means Obama would have been qualified to serve as well — had he been born in a foreign country, which he wasn’t.

Let’s wait to see how this Cruz story plays out. My bet, as I’ve noted already, is that the left won’t make Cruz’s birthplace nearly the issue that those on the right sought to do with Barack Obama.

Dewhurst puts on brass knuckles

Texas’s most interesting political contest in 2014 is going to be for lieutenant governor.

Bet on it.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has announced his plans to seek re-election for a fourth term to what used to be considered the state’s most powerful office. Rick Perry’s forever-long tenure as governor took care of that, as the Pride of Paint Creek redefined the governor’s office and made it No. 1 on the state’s political pecking order.

http://blog.beaumontenterprise.com/bayou/2013/08/12/dewhurst-announces-reelection-campaign-for-texas-lt-governor/

Dewhurst, though, wants to take back that role … or so it seems. He’ll have a crowded field of Republican primary challengers to fend off. Land Commissioner Jerry “The Gun Guy” Patterson is in the field; so is Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples; and the most recent participant is state Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston.

It occurs to me that three of them — Dewhurst, Patterson and Patrick — all hail from the greater Houston area. Just sayin’.

In Dewhurst’s vision of a perfect world, he wouldn’t be there. He’d be in the U.S. Senate. He ran into a right-wing attack dog in Ted Cruz in the 2012 GOP primary, who then beat Dewhurst in the runoff, spoiling the odds-on favorite’s chances to join to the Senate “club.”

Dewhurst became the victim of what’s become a newly coined verb. He was “Cruzed” in the primary. I’m betting he won’t let that happen again as he runs for re-election.

The lieutenant governor’s contest race is going to be fun to watch.

Chambliss makes sense on shutdown

Saxby Chambliss isn’t my kind of U.S. senator, but he’s trying to talk some sense into the rogue wing of his Republican Party.

His message today on Meet the Press: Shutting the government down to defund Obamacare would hurt the Republican Party and would hurt the American people.

http://thehill.com/video/sunday-shows/315421-chambliss-government-shutdown-would-play-into-obamas-hands

It’s not that care what happens to the GOP. I don’t. My only concern about Chambliss’s remarks is that he didn’t hold the harm to the public up as the far greater concern. His remarks, as I heard them, seemed to place those consequences on equal footing.

He mentioned Texas’s very own bomb-throwing senator, Republican Ted Cruz, one of the leaders of the shutdown movement. Chambliss said he admires Cruz’s “passion” for tea party causes and shares his desire to defund the Affordable Care Act. Shutting the government down, though, is the wrong course to take, Chambliss said.

I guess the skulls of Cruz and other tea party lawmakers are so thick they just cannot be told how much damage this proposed shutdown would cause them — and the country — if it comes to pass. Republicans tried that once before, in the late 1990s, and it cost them dearly.

Cruz heads for trouble within GOP?

Ted Cruz might turn into my favorite U.S. senator, not because I agree with him on policy — because I disagree with virtually every policy statement that comes out of his mouth — but because he’s providing such tremendous back-story theater on Capitol Hill.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/08/ted-cruz-declines-to-endorse-mitch-mcconnell-for-renomination-over-tea-party-foe/

As the link here notes, Cruz did not endorse Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who’s facing a tea party challenger in next year’s GOP primary. Cruz himself is a tea party darling.

I’m wondering: What if McConnell wins re-election next year in Kentucky and returns to run the Republican caucus in 2015? What’s he got up his sleeve for Cruz, the guy who so far has shunned him and talked out loud about how the establishment Republicans might need to get their clocks cleaned by the insurgent wing of the party.

I see some back-bench committee assignments awaiting the junior senator from Texas. But not to fear for Ted Cruz. He’ll find a way to have his voice heard above the din. He’s gotten pretty good at it so far in his brief time in the Senate.

He did manage to knock Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst off in the Texas GOP primary last spring before plowing over Democrat Paul Sadler in the general election. He sees his monstrous primary upset as his mandate to act unruly in the clubby Senate environment.

The link attached here also notes that Sen. John Cornyn of Texas faces re-election next year and there are rumblings he, too, might face a tea party challenge from within the Republican Party.

I’ll be waiting to see whether Cruz endorses his pal Cornyn.  

Cruz taunts fellow GOP senators

The junior Republican senator from Texas is proving a point I made the other day about the intraparty battle brewing over whether the shut the government down by cutting off money for the Affordable Care Act.

Ted Cruz asks, “What’s the alternative”?” to shutting ‘er down.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/07/trash-talk-politico-describes-team-cruz-attacks-on-fellow-republicans-as-taunting/

The Lone Star State firebrand – who’s been on the job less than eight months – wasn’t around to witness what happened when the Republicans got their heads handed to them over this very thing. The alternative, Sen. Cruz, is to work with Democrats and “establishment Republicans” to keep the government functioning.

Cruz also wasn’t in the Senate when that body – along with the House of Representatives – approved Obamacare. The Supreme Court then handed the Obama administration a clear victory when it ruled – albeit narrowly – that the law is in fact constitutional.

Thus, we have a standing law.

Congressional Republicans, though, keep trying to overturn what’s been done legally.

And this fight between the two wings of the GOP – the tea party wing and the establishment wing – is proving to be worth the price of entertainment all by itself.

Keep “taunting” those older, more experienced hands, Sen. Cruz.

What? Cruz, Cornyn and Obama on same side?

I believe hell has just frozen over.

U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, two stalwart Texas Republicans, have locked arms with the Democratic president of the United States, Barack Obama, in support of a student loan bill that rolls back a plan to double interest rates for students who have to pay back their college loans.

I’m pinching myself. I’m still here, yes?

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/07/cornyn-cruz-side-with-obama-on-bipartisan-student-loan-deal/

The bill sailed through the Senate with an 81-18 vote. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee was the lone GOP vote against it; Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri did not vote.

And get a load of this: The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is expected to approve the legislation in about a month, enabling the president to sign quickly into law.

The bill essentially ties student loan interest rates to the market, which effectively kills the plan that would have doubled the interest rates students would be charged. The effect of that would have a serious impact on non-scholarship students’ ability to pay for college.

We all want our young people to get as much education as possible, yes?

As the San Antonio Express-News reported, the bill would have an impact on approximately 650,000 Texas college students.

I’m glad — no, delighted — to see this demonstration of bipartisanship, especially when it involves two fire-breathing Republican senators from Texas.

I do not, though, expect it continue. Politics is politics, you know, and that means the two sides are going to look for reasons to sink their teeth into each other’s throat.Â