On Law, Politics, and Being R
afael edward cruz — he began being called Ted at 13 — was headed toward a career in law from his earliest days.
It has been reported that the vale-
dictorian at Second Baptist High School in Houston, Texas, could recite the entire U.S. Constitution by heart as a teenager. “I don’t anymore,” Cruz admits with
a grin. “That was a long time ago. And what I memorized was a shortened mnemonic [memory prompt] version of the Constitution. It wasn’t a word for word verbatim. “I was part of a group called the
FAMILY MAN Cruz with his father, Rafael, and with his wife, Heidi, and their two daughters. Relaxation for him “is just being a dad,” he says.
Constitutional Collaborators, where we toured the state of Texas and spoke on the Constitution. And before we spoke, there were five high school kids who were part of it and we went on ea- sels, we would write the Constitution from memory in the shortened mnemon- ic form.” He also recalled
that he and his fel- low Collaborators “would also write a
definition of socialism on the principle that if you don’t know what it is, you can’t identify it when you have it. “That definition was government
ownership or control of the means of production or distribution in an econ- omy, and we would write a quote from Thomas Jefferson: ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.’” Cruz studied at Princeton Univer-
sity, where he graduated cum laude, and then went to Harvard Law School. He was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude. In 2000, he joined the presidential campaign of Texas Gov. George W. Bush as a policy adviser. He served on Bush’s legal team dur-
ing the drawn-out “hanging chads” dis- pute over Florida’s electoral votes that culminated in the case of Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court — which al- lowed Florida’s count showing Bush the winner of its electoral votes stand and made the Texas governor presi- dent. Cruz briefly worked as an associate deputy attorney general in the Bush
administration, but in 2003, he re- turned to the Lone Star State to accept Attorney General Greg Abbott’s offer to be solicitor general. He argued nine cases before the U.S.
Supreme Court — a record for any Tex- as lawyer — and drew particularly high marks from conservatives for his win- ning defense of having the Ten Com- mandments on a state monument. Cruz had initially planned to run for
attorney general when his boss Abbott moved on. But he quickly shifted his sights in
2011 when then-Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison unexpectedly an- nounced her retirement. In what some called a preview of Donald Trump’s eventual triumph over the Republican establishment in 2016, newly minted Senate hopeful Cruz mobilized the then-widespread Tea Party movement as well as national conservative icons such as Sarah Palin and radio talk show host Mark Levin behind his candidacy. In returns that stunned the state
and its political punditocracy, Cruz defeated Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (who had outspent him 2 to 1) with 57% of the vote. He went on to win
56 NEWSMAX | SEPTEMBER 2023
OMAR VEGA/GETTY IMAGES / BRETT COOMER/HOUSTON CHRONICLE VIA GETTY IMAGES / JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
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