Ted Cruz Quotes

I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

Do you really think that if Jesus came back, he'd be hanging out with Ted fuckinging Cruz? Ted Cruz's wife doesn't hang out with Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is a skin-walker and a demon from the nether region.

Government is never a source of goods. Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.

Happiness doesn’t come from popularity, but rather from doing something that matters, making a difference, and fulfilling God’s plan for your life.

It is impossible to defeat an enemy when you can’t even admit that it exists.

to the conventional wisdom, liberals in my experience tend to be far less open-minded and welcoming of diverse opinions than conservatives.

we do not prevent crime by robbing law-abiding Americans of their constitutional liberties. Instead we target violent criminals and come down on them like a ton of bricks.

There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz.

Telling the truth in Washington, D.C., is a radical act. And it earns you the enmity of career politicians in both parties. When you tell the truth about Washington—when you expose the fact that elected officials are misleading the voters who elected them—you pay a price. It’s one thing to criticize the other party. But when you admit publicly that many of those in your own party are complicit in the problem, well, that’s when the long knives come out.

The Bush administration came to office promising to revitalize the Reagan Revolution—which had inspired me to get into politics in the first place. Instead, it took the Republican Party down the path of bigger government, excessive spending, and new entitlement programs that we couldn’t afford.

To be fair, something strange had happened. Donald Trump won the election. There was a Maya Angelou quote that ricocheted across social media during the 2016 election: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Trump showed us who he was gleefully, constantly. He mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam and suggested Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate JFK; he bragged about the size of his penis and mused that his whole life had been motivated by greed; he made no mystery of his bigotry or sexism; he called himself a genius while retweeting conspiracy theories in caps lock.

Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was, and never will be.

Anyway, here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz. I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

And really, wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill—or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul—ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable.

Let me be clear: I don't trust the Republicans. And I don't trust the Democrats, & I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don't trust the Republicans & the Democrats, because it is leadership in both parties that has gotten us in this mess.

What the mainstream politicos did not understand about Ronald Reagan was that he was running for a reason—not for money and not for fame (he already had both). He was running to change the country. Even more galling to the professional class that worked hard to polish the rough edges off their candidates for office, Reagan intended to be who he was.

As liberal law professor Turley has observed, “President Obama [has become] the president [that] Richard Nixon always wanted to be.

But one cannot negotiate from weakness—especially with bullies and tyrants.

the greatest engine of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever seen has been the American free enterprise system.

Abraham Lincoln. He was the first president elected to office under the Republican Party’s new banner—a party established to oppose slavery and defend human freedom.

Maimonides, said there are eight steps in helping the needy. The lowest of these is the handout; the highest is to teach them to help themselves.” •

Senators like Ted Cruz and congressmen like Matt Gaetz aspire to be multiplatform entertainers more than they care about governing.

It was too much. I raised my hand and said, “There’s no universe in which I can consent to that.” I had spent two years promising Texans that if they voted for me I would fight with every breath in my body to stop the out-of-control spending and debt that is bankrupting our kids and grandkids. I

•   “We’ve had enough talk—disruptive talk—in America of left and right, dividing us down the center. There is really no such choice facing us. The only choice we have is up or down—up, to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down, to the deadly dullness of totalitarianism.

wrong. Ted Cruz is a smart, canny, talented guy who ran a great “long race” campaign. He aspires to be Reagan but, trust me, he’s Nixon—right down to the incredible discipline and smarts playing the political game.

Similarly, Australia recently followed the path of President Obama and the Democrats, responding to a terrible shooting by banning handguns altogether. The results have been disturbing. Since banning handguns, sexual assaults and rapes in Australia have skyrocketed, because there are few things a criminal likes better than an unarmed victim.

It’s also worth noting that gun control laws are notoriously ineffective. Facts matter, and cities with the strictest gun control regularly have among the highest murder rates. Thus, D.C. and Chicago have for decades had horrendous crime rates, even though both have been at the extreme vanguard of taking away their residents’ gun rights. In contrast, Texas cities like Dallas and Houston and El Paso—where citizens are often armed and able to protect themselves—have murder rates that are a fraction of Chicago’s and Washington’s.

The display, which was called 'Can Democracy Survive the Internet?' was dedicated to a 'global election management' company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica claimed to have gathered 5,000 data points on every American voter online: what you liked and what you shared on social media; how and where you shopped; who your friends were... They claimed to be able to take this imprint of your online self, use it to understand your deepest drives and desires, and then draw on that analysis to change your voting behaviour. The boast seemed to be backed up by success: Cambridge Analytica had worked on the victorious American presidential campaign of Donald Trump; it had also run successful campaigns for US Senator Ted Cruz (twice); and others all across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America.

For nearly fifty years after the release of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” Americans fought back against the statism that Reagan feared. Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed in the 1970s. So did Hillary Clinton’s in the 1990s. But in 2010, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, President Barack Obama found just barely enough support in Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats, to pass Obamacare.

Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.

helping the needy. The lowest of these is the handout; the highest is to teach them to help themselves.” •

Because Reagan once said, you can't be for big government, big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.   Boy,

But those in poverty don’t have that luxury. They are often surrounded by crime, traveling alone late at night, and the Second Amendment is a vital tool to protecting their safety.

An individual’s life prospects increase dramatically with each successfully completed phase of education.

Campaigns are no place for candidates who think they walk on water.

The only candidate to really escape Trump’s wrath has been Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and that’s because Cruz has spent the entire political season nuzzling Trump’s ankles, praising the Donald like a lovesick cellmate. The Texas senator, whose rhetorical schtick is big doses of Tea Party crazy (his best line was that Obama wanted to bring “expanded Medicaid” to ISIS)

You might also be wondering how the Obama administration thought they would get away with this disaster. I think their intention was simply to blame insurance companies when people started seeing their health insurance plans canceled. Liberals excel at vilifying the business sector, and the more they can demonize private-sector insurers, the more leverage they believe they will have for continuing to move toward the Holy Grail of the left that Ronald Reagan warned against in 1961—a single-payer, government-funded, socialized health-care system.

Despite Alex Jones’ enormous appeal, not one candidate was pushing for his support as the primaries drew closer—not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not Ben Carson, not Jeb Bush. No one! It was just mind-boggling how candidates chose to turn their backs on such a pool of potential voters as those millions of Americans who listen to or watch Alex Jones every day. Alex didn’t need any convincing

If the clicker became useless in grown men's hands, no games to watch, no highlights shown, ESPN left with only test patterns and re-runs of Rudy, wouldn't the indignation level be a whole lot higher? If sports, all sports, all levels, were shut down, wouldn't the big clock be ticking a lot louder? Wouldn't John Boehner be calling the President and vice versa? Wouldn't Ted Cruz have to shut up in a hurry?

I know that big government sounds appealing sometimes when you are hurting and struggling to make ends meet and then a politician comes along and says: I'm going to create a new program called jobs for Americans and health care for everybody. When you are struggling, this stuff sounds enticing. The problem is it never works. Anytime and anywhere it has been tried, it has failed, and it will fail again. It doesn't work.   In

The real war on women today can be found in the policies that have resulted in 3.7 million more women living in poverty under President Obama, and the median annual wage for women dropping $733 over the past six years.

But how would the American people have reacted if President Obama had said, In order to extend insurance to 14 million people, we’re going to jeopardize the health insurance of about 200 million Americans? Many of you will lose your policies, and your doctors. Others will see your premiums skyrocket. That is the absurd bargain at the heart of Obamacare. That’s why Gruber noted, rightly, that it could be passed only through deception.

As Reagan said, “individual freedom and the profit motive were the engines of progress which transformed an American wilderness into an economic dynamo that provided the American people with a standard of living that is still the envy of the world.

Conservatives are wary of big union bosses. We need to explain why: because unions confiscate wages to fill their own coffers and pursue their own agenda. By demanding costly regulations on growing businesses, the union bosses make it harder for low-skilled workers to get jobs.

Senate Democrats introduced an amendment to the Constitution that would have amended the Bill of Rights to give Congress broad authority to regulate political speech. Sadly, tragically, astonishingly, every single Democrat in the Senate voted to repeal the free speech provisions of the First Amendment.

There was also the matter of four dead Americans at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya: Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador killed on duty since the Carter years; foreign service officer Sean Smith; and retired Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. The September 11, 2012, attack on the Benghazi compound was coordinated and carried out by radical Islamic terrorists. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified to the Senate that he knew “immediately” that it was a terrorist attack. And yet for weeks President Obama and Secretary Clinton insisted instead that it was a spontaneous protest over an Internet video.

In its perpetual role as the praetorian guard of the Obama presidency, the New York Times has helpfully explained that President Obama simply “misspoke” when the falsehood was revealed. But one does not misspeak twenty-eight times. Nor is it “misspeaking” to deliberately and repeatedly state something that you know to be false.

As soon as Trump announced in 2015, I immediately set out to report what the mainstream news media were not. I wrote an early piece that posed twenty-one questions I thought reporters should ask on the campaign trail. Not one of them did. Late in the primaries, Senator Marco Rubio brought up my question about Trump University and Senator Ted Cruz posed my question about Trump’s dealings with the Genovese and Gambino crime families, matters explored in this book. I will always wonder what might have happened had journalists and some of the sixteen candidates vying with Trump for the Republican nomination started asking my questions months earlier. This

It is astonishing that President Obama’s conception of federal power is so vast that four liberal justices on the Supreme Court have joined their colleagues in unanimously ruling against the president more than 20 times in five and a half years—double his predecessor’s rate of unanimous defeats and 25 percent greater than President Clinton’s.

During one hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Twitter and Facebook now have power that is much greater than that of any other company that has ever existed in the United States, and that’s including the ones that have been broken up by antitrust laws. According to the rules of the free market, you need to have competition. Otherwise, the company that controls the whole thing becomes lazy, corrupt, or worse. This is what is happening right now with big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Because they’re so big and because they’re almost 100 percent liberal, they have the power to tilt the national conversation to the left and literally block the voices on the right.

Consider the various ways in which Trump’s campaign represented a one-man campaign against established knowledge. He was one of the original “birthers” who demanded that Barack Obama prove his American citizenship. He quoted the National Enquirer approvingly as a source of news. He sided with antivaccine activism. He admitted that he gets most of his information on foreign policy from “the shows” on Sunday morning television. He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died from natural causes in early 2016, might have been murdered. And he charged that the father of one of his opponents (Ted Cruz) was involved in the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Ted’s a Bushman with deep ties to the political and financial establishment. Ted and Heidi brag about being the first “Bush marriage”—they met as Bush staffers and that meeting ultimately led to matrimony. Ted was an adviser on legal affairs while Heidi was an adviser on economic policy and eventually director for the Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. Condi helped give us the phony war in Iraq. And Chad Sweet, Ted Cruz’s campaign chairman, is a former CIA officer. Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s former Secretary of Homeland Security, hired Sweet from Goldman Sachs to restructure and optimize the flow of information between the CIA, FBI and other members of the national security community and DHS.

In my time in Washington, no battle has consumed more energy than stopping Obamacare. On the evening of September 24, 2013, it began with a prayer. In my tiny “hideaway” office wedged into a dome in the Capitol Building, Senator Mike Lee and I bowed our heads, read from the Book of Psalms, and asked for the Lord’s guidance. I then walked to the floor of the U.S. Senate and announced, “I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.”* I opened by noting that “all across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” And yet politicians in Washington were not listening to the concerns of their constituents. They weren’t hearing the people with jobs lost or the people forced into part-time work. They had no answers for the people losing their health insurance, or the people who are struggling. With good reason, men and women across America believe that politicians get elected, go to Washington, and stop listening to them. This is the most common thing you hear from the man on the street, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: You’re not listening to me.

The president also unilaterally repealed a key provision in the welfare-to-work reform that President Clinton signed into law in 1996. The premise of welfare reform in the 1990s was that those who benefit from our social safety net should be required to prepare for work, look for work, or work. But in 2012, the Obama administration announced that it would issue waivers of this work requirement.

Fifty-six Democratic senators proposed repealing the free-speech protections of the First Amendment. The media were silent, and yet the American people deserve to know that a majority of their senators were so afraid of political opposition that they wanted to empower the federal government to police who can speak, and when, and for how long—and on what subjects. That was a radical break from the vision of our Founders.

It’s very hard for Hollywood celebrities to understand this. They have no need to own a firearm, because typically they retain armed bodyguards who travel with them. Likewise, other liberal elites living in wealthy suburbs have the resources to hire out their self-protection to the local police through higher property values and property taxes. The threat to their lives, to their property, and to their families is minimized.

As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17 Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, was a Supreme Court clerk, worked in the Bush administration, and is a former assistant attorney general. His wife was born in the coastal town of San Luis Obispo, California, and holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College, an MA from Université Libre de Bruxelles, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She works as a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Everyone in America understands ObamaCare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States--it doesn't matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn't matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians--Americans understand this thing is not working.   Yet Washington is pretending not to know. Washington is pretending to have no awareness. Instead we have politicians giving speeches about how wonderful ObamaCare is. At the same time they go to the President and ask for an exemption from ObamaCare for Members of Congress.   If ObamaCare is so wonderful, why is it that its loudest advocates don't want to be subject to it? I will confess that is a very difficult one to figure out.   DC

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration followed the same pattern, leading the world in relaxing sanctions against North Korea; as a result, billions of dollars flowed into that country, and they used that money to develop nuclear weapons. Ironically, the Obama administration recruited the very same person—Wendy Sherman—who had led the failed North Korea talks to become our lead negotiator with Iran. But here the results are likely to be far worse.

Conservatives favor educational reform, such as vouchers and scholarships and charter schools. Again we need to explain why: because education reform empowers parents and expands opportunities for kids struggling to get ahead in schools that have failed them. It is at its core a civil rights issue, and it is fundamentally unfair to trap kids in bad schools because of their race, ethnicity, income level, or simply because they live in the wrong zip codes.

When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

We should set an audacious goal of enacting policies to encourage the private sector to create 10 million new jobs. Enough for full recovery. Good, blue-collar jobs with strong wages and work with dignity. High-paying white-collar jobs in expanding technologies. Full-time jobs, not people trapped in endless part-time positions. Multiple, exciting job opportunities for young people coming out of school. Get government out of the way and unleash the creativity of millions of small businesses.

For young people who have never known anything other than these abysmal economic conditions, there is another way. Every time we have implemented pro free-enterprise policies of restraining taxes, restraining regulation, reining in out-of-control government spending and debt, the result has been small businesses have prospered and thrived. They have created jobs, and the result has been young people could get jobs, full-time jobs that advance towards a career and towards the American Dream.  

Thus, when a jihadist gunned down killed down fourteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, the administration called it “workplace violence.” When Islamists murdered Jews in a kosher deli in Paris, Obama described their anti-Semitic rampage as simply “random” violence. When ISIS beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christians, the White House suggested it was merely because they were “Egyptian citizens.” To the contrary, they were murdered because of their faith, and, as Pope Francis powerfully observed, “their blood confesses Christ.

I also was proud to represent John Thompson, a Louisiana man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Two of my partners had represented Thompson pro bono for decades, and they had uncovered DNA evidence that proved his innocence. Tragically, the Louisiana district attorney’s office had deliberately suppressed the DNA evidence, and Thompson spent eighteen years of his life imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. He was released, and he subsequently sued the DA’s office for their wrongful conduct. A jury awarded him $14 million, and I helped represent Thompson on appeal.

The Grassley-Cruz bill addressed each of these failings, directing law enforcement resources to stop violent criminals from using guns to harm others. It created a gun crime task force, to prosecute violent gun criminals and also felons and fugitives trying to illegally buy guns. It directed resources to helping states report mental health records to the federal background check system. And it enhanced school safety funding, to protect vulnerable children. As a result, it garnered more bipartisan support than any other comprehensive piece of gun legislation—and far more support than the 40 votes Dianne Feinstein’s so-called assault weapons ban received. With votes from 52 senators—9 Democrats and 43 Republicans—Grassley-Cruz could have become the law of the land—if Harry Reid and his Democratic allies had not filibustered it.

You all should feel excited. You have made history, although, unfortunately, not for a good reason, because the government has put policies in place that have so hammered small businesses that they have created a job market that makes life incredibly difficult for young people.   The recession of the early 1980s was comparable but was followed by a rapid recovery.   Well, gosh, what happened in the early 1980s? President Ronald Reagan was elected. He implemented policies the exact opposite of this administration's policies. Instead of jacking up taxes by $1.7 trillion, as this Congress and this President has done, President Reagan slashed taxes and simplified the Tax Code. Instead of exploding government spending and the debt, President Reagan restrained the growth of government spending. And instead of unleashing regulators like locusts that destroy small businesses, President Reagan restrained regulation and the result was incredible growth.   For

Sean Penn mourned the death of the fifty-eight-year-old socialist creep. Sean wrote in a statement sent to the Hollywood Reporter: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” He added: “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” Penn needs to tell you that he knew the guy. A world leader. That’s cool. I guess playing Jeff Spicoli and marrying Madonna wasn’t enough (one made your career, the other ruined your urinary tract). Yeah, this is the same chap who told Piers Morgan that Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Talk about the pot calling the kettle batshit crazy. If Penn got any nuttier, he’d be a Snickers bar. Of course it would be uncool to point out to Penn that Chávez was no champion of the poor. Under his rule people became far poorer in Venezuela. And in the midst of an oil boom, Chávez engineered a murder boom. The murder rate in his country tripled during Chávez’s tyrannical tenure, hitting a high of 67 per 100,000 residents in 2011, compared with a murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 in the United States (and that includes Baltimore). And about 10 or 20 less than the last Penn movie. Penn was joined, per usual, by director Oliver Stone, who said, solemnly, somewhere: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.” He added: “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” This is from an adult, mind you. And no list of apologists for evil is complete without Michael Moore. This nugget comes from the Michigan Live website, which reports Moore praising Chávez in a feeble collection of Twitter messages, on the night the Venezuelan viper expired. Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US

In the 2016 elections, white fear ruled the day. Trump used fear to prime the pumps of white American racial resentment by fanning the flames of the birther myth against Barack Obama, claiming that Obama was not a native-born American citizen. For years Trump stoked the fires of the birther myth, continuing even after Canadian-born Ted Cruz became his primary opposition in the 2016 Republican primaries. Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed. All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible make every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures. The shrug and smile that so many Republican leaders have adopted has allowed Trump to dismiss those who challenge his lunacy as “angry Democrats,” because it is Democrats who seem capable of explaining that Ted Cruz’s dad didn’t kill JFK. But Trump isn’t an addled senior citizen—actually he is, but he’s one who happens to be the president of the United States. The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency. Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy. This

In the Citizens United fight for free speech rights, “ While Senate Democrats sought to empower Congress to restrict individual citizens’ political speech rights, they did not want to apply that same treatment to giant media corporations like CNN and the New York Times...Citizens United was a conservative nonprofit corporation that made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. And Senate Democrats now wanted to give the federal government the constitutional authority to punish anyone for criticizing Hillary Clinton or any other political candidate." -p. 116

The way the First Step Act passed, through policy, legal, and constitutional arguments about what is right, appropriate, and just, through a consideration of facts and data and evidence about what is most effective in deterring crime and preventing recidivism-- all of it was done through the legislative process That is how our system is supposed to work. Elected legislatures exist to consider and to weigh policy arguments and to reflect the wishes and values of the voters who elected them. When unelected judges seize issues of the criminal law and mandate that violent criminals receive lesser punishments, they are going against both the constitutional structure and their responsibility as judges. -pp. 162-3

The Supreme Court is supposed to protect our constitutional rights. It is also charged with securing our Constitution’s defining structural features, federalism and the separation of powers. Both doctrines protect Liberty by dividing power, by establishing checks and balances to prevent any branch of government from becoming too powerful...Over the past six decades, the Court has arrogated to itself far too much power-- well beyond what it is entitled to under the Constitution. It has seized this power at the expense of Congress, the executive branch, the states, and We the People alike. -p. Xxv

There is no moral and just government that does not respect the religious liberty protections of its people. True political liberty, free speech, social stability,and human flourishing all depend upon a robust and durable protection, under the rule of law, of our fundamental right to choose our faith. And, on the flip side, efforts to undermine religious liberty and to persecute religious minorities are a telltale sign of tyrannical government. -p. 1

Education is antecedent to most of our other public policy concerns. From poverty to crime to healthcare to substance abuse, if kids don’t get an education, we know that those other challenges are far more likely to follow; conversely, if children do get an excellent education, each of those problems is much more likely to be overcome. It is a damning stain on America’s conscience that a child’s chances of life success are so heavily influenced by-- perhaps dictated by-- the zip code in which he or she is raised. It is a profound civil rights crisis… the urgent need to secure access to a quality education-- and access to educational choice, in particular-- for every young American… In a just world, teachers unions would enthusiastically support school choice...But the union bosses who lead the teachers unions have decided that school choice is an existential threat to their power, and so they demand partisan fealty above all. -pp. 28-9

But the Gosnell horror show, as utterly tragic as it was, represents one specific instance of abortion policy. From a broader legal perspective, the question facing any society is whether the rule of law should presume in favor of life. History is filled with sad and sorry examples of legal rules presuming against life, from the Dred Scott decision that barbarically justified treating African-American slaves as ‘property’ and not as humans, to the Nazi propoganda dehumanizing Jews that helped give rise to the genocidal murder of the Holocaust -pp. 95, 96

The campaign-finance limits help incumbents and substantially hurt unknown challengers...An abject willingness to strip away the free speech rights of American citizens has become an explicit litmus test for judicial appointments from today’s radicalized Democrats. And, as a constitutional matter, on the Supreme Court, when it comes to either protecting or destroying our fundamental protections for political speech-- the very heart and soul of our representative democracy-- we are, sadly, only one vote away. -pp. 134, 137

I believe in capital punishment. I believe in carrying out justice for those who commit unspeakable crimes, retribution for those who have been horribly victimized, and strong deterrence for the community to prevent horrific crime from happening again. -p. 144

If history teaches anything, it is that when people tell you they want to kill you, believe them. Or, at a minimum, don’t give them hundreds of billions of dollars to help them accomplish their objective. But, for whatever reason, Obama desperately wanted a deal with Iran.

Republicans have, historically speaking, been absolutely terrible at judicial nominations--...Republicans at best bat .500. Once confirmed as justices, at most, half of Republicans’ Supreme Court nominations actually behave as we hoped they might behave in terms of remaining faithful to their oath of office and the Constitution...The most important criteria that I believe should be applied is whether that individual (1) has a demonstrated proven record of being faithful to the Constitution and (2) has endured pounding criticism-- has paid a price for holding that line. -pp. 199, 228

The soldiers instructed the kindergartners to close their eyes and pray to God. To ask for candy. They did; they opened their eyes, and there was no candy. Then, they told the children to close their eyes and pray to Fidel Castro for candy. They did. And when they opened their eyes, each child had a piece of candy on his or her desk, quietly slipped there by the soldiers. Marxism always begins that way. By destroying allegiance to anything other than the state, Dear Leader, El Comandante. Faith in God must be destroyed. Devotion to family must be destroyed. Children are taught to betray their parents, to report what they said at home if it differs from the views mandated by the government. Anything that might get in the way of complete and absolute loyalty and obedience to the revolution must be eradicated.

The popular culture has also lowered the threshold on public shaming rituals. It is not only suppressing certain speech on college campuses, but making public denunciation of certain classes of people into a form of popular entertainment. The masters of the funny cheap shot are comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who routinely and cleverly skewer conservatives as stupid bigots. After the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, for example, Stewart asked what was wrong with opponents of same-sex marriage, as if a view held for thousands of years, even not very long ago by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, were incomprehensible. The use of humor is a cultural trick. It provides a cultural permission slip to be nasty because, or so the assumption goes, the enemies of "the people" are so unattractive that they deserve whatever Stewart or Colbert throws at them. When Stewart compares Senator Ted Cruz to the Harry Potter character Voldemort, he knows we will then think of Cruz as the book's author describes Voldemort, "a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering". It may seem futile to complain about the crudeness of American mass culture. It has been around for decades, and it is not about to change anytime soon. The thin line that exists these days between politics and entertainment (witness the rise of Donald Trump) is undoubtedly coarsening our politics. It is becoming more culturally acceptable to split the world into us-versus-them schemata and to indulge in all sorts of antisocial and illiberal fantasies about crushing one's enemies. Only a few decades ago most liberals had a different idea of tolerance. Most would explain it with some variation of Evelyn Beatrice Hall's line about Voltaire's philosophy of free speech: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". That is no longer the case. It is now deemed necessary, indeed even noble, to be intolerant in the cause of tolerance. Any remark or viewpoint that liberals believe is critical of minorities is by definition intolerant. A liberal critique of conservatives or religious people, on the other hand, is, again by definition, incapable of being intolerant. It is a willful double standard. For liberals, intolerance is a one-way street leading straight to conservatism.

What confused me was that by this point, Trump was winning the race for the nomination. He had vanquished everyone but Ted Cruz, who was at least as disliked by Republicans as Trump was and way behind in the delegate count. The prospect of Trump as the nominee was getting more and more likely, and yet he maintained his focus on me. If winning couldn’t distract him from coming after me, would anything? This will keep going until he chooses to stop or he loses, I thought. But he wasn’t stopping, and he wasn’t losing. That meant I likely had months—or even months plus eight years—more of this. Over

Instead of the patriotic pageantry Republicans typically produce, the four-day event was a strange, dark, almost dystopian affair whose attempt to unify the party was marred by Ted Cruz’s public refusal to endorse Trump, prompting the crowd to boo him off the stage during prime time.

We shall NEVVVVVVVER SURRRRRRRRRRRENDER!!!!

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates that there are 340 jurisdictions with sanctuary policies, located in forty-three states and the District of Columbia. CIS found that in just one eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 deportable aliens were released by sanctuary jurisdictions. Three thousand were felons and 62 percent had prior criminal records. Nineteen hundred were later rearrested a total of 4,300 times on 7,500 offenses including assaults, burglaries, sexual assaults, thefts, and even murders—none of which would have occurred except for these sanctuary policies! Such sanctuary policies are illegal under federal immigration law, which specifies that “no State or local government entity may be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any alien in the United States.”9 But in accordance with its nonenforcement policy on immigration, the Obama administration announced in 2010 that it would not sue sanctuary cities for violating federal law. As Kate Steinle’s father, Jim Steinle, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 21, 2015: Everywhere Kate went throughout the world, she shined the light of a good citizen of the United States of America. Unfortunately, due to disjointed laws and basic incompetence at many levels, the U.S. has suffered a self-inflicted wound in the murder of our daughter by the hand of a person who should have never been on the streets of this country.10 Kate Steinle’s murderer had been deported five times, and kept reentering the country with no consequences. So on July 9, 2015, Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) introduced H.R. 3011—Kate’s Law—to impose a five-year mandatory prison sentence on anyone arrested in the United States after having been previously deported. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). But the Obama administration made it clear it would not support such a bill if it passed Congress.

Pissed off by the lies, misrepresentations, and outright horseshit, I decided it was time to strike back. It was time to reclaim the Constitution. Besides, if the Righties were wrong about everything else—like health care, climate change, and the corporate tax rate—they had to be wrong about the Constitution. First, I did my homework. I read the Constitution and the amendments; perused The FederalistV and Madison’s notes taken during the Constitutional Convention; surveyed the lives of the Founders and FramersVI; looked over the Supreme Court opinions of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; and even tried to digest Glenn Beck’s The Original Argument, Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments, and Dr. Ben Carson’s A More Perfect Union—three of the best over-the-counter sleep aids on the market. To find out how the mind of a strict constructionist works, I also dipped into Ted Cruz’s autobiography, A Time for Truth, a faith-based romance novel in which the hero falls in love with himself at an early age.

But Trump apparently wanted to squeeze some extra juice from the word “lying” and make his branding stand out. So he insisted that Lyin’ Ted was the proper spelling, not Lying Ted. This was good branding. It was different from anything you have seen in politics and it gave you a reason to pause and wonder why it mattered if the spelling was “lyin’” or “lying.” It did matter, but only because you stopped and wondered about it. That is an engineered mental pause for persuasion. Trump wants you to stop and think about his choice of “lyin’” over “lying.” The fact that you spent time thinking about it helps you remember the name. It also uses a trick called “making you think past the sale.” In this case the sale is the idea that Ted Cruz lies. You end up accidentally accepting that idea because you spent time thinking about the best way to write “lyin’.” That’s strong persuasion engineering.

Here I pause to say I know nothing of Ted Cruz’s record of honesty. I have no idea whether he is better or worse than any other politician. I’m focusing on his physical appearance and Trump’s persuasion. And on those levels, Lyin’ Ted simply looked like a liar. The reality might be very different, but that doesn’t matter to our story today. What matters is that the Lyin’ Ted nickname stuck like glue. It was fresh political wording, it was provocative, it had a visual element in Cruz’s liar-looking face, and it was designed to get stronger over time with confirmation bias. You can’t engineer persuasion better than that.

Getting its target audience to conclude that facts and truth are “unknowable” is the true objective of any disinformation campaign. Climate change deniers aren’t trying to convince people that surveys they commissioned are better than those agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists. Antigovernment conspiracy theorists aren’t really trying to convince people that some towns in the Midwest are governed under Sharia law, or that Jade Helm was an attempt by Obama to come for their guns. If someone actually believes the falsehood, that’s a bonus, but the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw their hands up and give up on “facts.” Do vaccines cause autism? Maybe. Was Senator Ted Cruz’s father involved with President Kennedy’s assassination? Anything’s possible. Is Hillary Clinton running a child-sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor? Who knows?

Until this past month, one could essentially purchase Canadian citizenship for about C$100,000 – the interest on a five-year loan of 800K to the government – a price tag that was kept under the radar of the populace, who grew furious on learning it was actually true. It was also collectively humiliated to learn how relatively cheap the price tag was. Also in Canadian citizenship news, Texas senator and Tea party enthusiast Ted Cruz – a man with presidential aspirations – has formally renounced his Canadian citizenship. Born in Canada in 1970 to an American mother, Cruz has always been an American citizen and is technically eligible to run for president, but his opponents ran a vicious smear campaign cruelly branding him as “Canadian Ted”.

A few weeks ago UPS sent a letter to 15,000 employees and it said: We are terminating spousal health insurance because of ObamaCare. Their husbands and wives were told: Sorry, your health insurance is gone. Remember, the promise was: If you like your health insurance, you can keep it. For those 15,000 UPS employees--for their husbands and wives--that promise has been disproved by reality. This body would step up and stop ObamaCare if we did just one thing: if we listened to our constituents. So together that is what we have to do: Make DC listen.   A

Today, there is no greater threat to U.S. national security than the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Led by theocratic zealots who have pledged to “annihilate Israel” and who regularly lead chants of “Death to America,” an Iran with nuclear weapons poses an unacceptably high risk of murdering millions of Americans or millions of our allies. For

President Obama’s proposed deal makes military conflict with Irana virtual certainty. Under the terms that have been publicly announced, Iran will keep its nuclear centrifuges, will keep its enriched uranium, and will keep developing its ICBM program (which exists for the sole purpose of carrying a nuclear weapon to America). Under the terms of the deal, Iran will receive billions of dollars — which it will surely use to keep developing nuclear weapons. And, becauseIran will remain the leading state sponsor of terrorism (the deal does nothing to change that), those billions of dollars will also be funneled directly to Hezbollah and Hamas and radical Islamic terrorists across the world. Along

President Obama is fond of posing a false dichotomy: either you support his current Iran deal, or you want war. But, as Israel‘s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly observed, “a bad deal is worse than no deal.” As it stands, Corker-Cardin is a bad deal that paves the way for the President’s worse deal with Iran. In

We all remember when President Obama told the American people: If you like your health insurance, you can keep it. Now at the time that sounded good. Any of us who liked our health insurance wanted to keep it. We liked that promise. That is the kind of promise we like from our candidates and our officeholders.   Yet as I mentioned earlier, one of the great faculties of higher reason is the ability to learn--the ability to learn from evidence and facts. We have learned that promise did not, in fact, meet reality because the reality is millions of Americans are at risk of losing their health insurance.   A

In January 2017, we will have a new President. He or she will likely encounter an Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. If President Obama has implemented his bad deal—if he has unraveled the international consensus in favor of strict sanctions on Iran—then sanctions will in all likelihood be impossible to re-impose. Doing so would take months or years (if at all), probably too far out to prevent a nuclear Iran. Thus,

Thus, the next president would be left with two choices: acquiesce to Iranhaving nuclear weapons (which it could then use to murder Americans and our allies), or launch a targeted military attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. The

On Sept. 26, 2012, an American pastor named Saeed Abedini who was visiting family and fellow Christians in Tehran was dragged out of the private home he was staying in and hauled away to jail by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Friday marked the second anniversary of his imprisonment, and for the last two years he has been beaten, abused and subjected to solitary confinement for weeks on end in Iran’s most notoriously dangerous prisons for the crime of professing his Christian faith. Pastor