Facts about Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz Biography
Ted Cruz became a U.S. senator from Texas in 2013 and ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. president in 2016.
Ted Cruz’s mother was from Delaware, his father from Cuba, and Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1970 when his father was working in the oil industry in Canada. Cruz grew up in Texas and got his education in the Ivy League, graduating from Princeton University (1992) and then Harvard Law School (1995). He was as a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist before landing a job at the Washington law firm of Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, where his jobs included helping to prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton.
In 1999 he joined the campaign of George W. Bush as a domestic policy advisor; after Bush’s victory in 2000, Cruz worked as associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, and then director of the Office of Policy Planning for the Federal Trade Commission. Cruz was appointed Solicitor General for Texas in 2003, serving until 2008, when he began practicing corporate law in the Houston firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. He surprised political experts by winning a seat as the state’s U.S. senator in 2012, replacing the retiring Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
As a new senator, Cruz made a splash in 2013 by leading an ill-fated charge to repeal the Affordable Care Act (AKA “Obamacare”), even taking the Senate floor for a 21-hour speech in which, among other things, he read from Dr. Seuss’s book Green Eggs and Ham. The incident cemented his reputation as a conservative rebel with a knack for finding the spotlight and the power to irritate both Democrats and his fellow Republicans; in April of 2013, Foreign Policy magazine called him “the most hated man in the Senate.” Cruz is an outspoken opponent of abortion and gay marriage, a fierce supporter of gun rights, and is well-known for his disbelief in global warming. His official biography has called him “a passionate fighter for limited government, economic growth, and the Constitution.”
Ted Cruz announced on March 23, 2015, in a speech at Liberty University, that he would run for the Republican nomination for U.S. president in 2016. A year later he was one of three GOP candidates remaining in the race, along with Donald Trump and John Kasich. However, both Cruz and Kasich dropped out in May of 2016, leaving Trump as the eventual GOP nominee. Cruz was reelected for a second U.S. Senate term in 2018.
Extra credit
Ted Cruz married to the former Heidi Nelson in 2001; they met when both were policy advisors to the first campaign of George W. Bush. They have two daughters: Caroline and Catherine… Ted Cruz was born in Canada, which would seem not to meet the Constitutional requirement that presidents must be “natural-born citizens.” However, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the precise meaning of that phrase, and Cruz contends that because his mother was born in Delaware, he qualifies as a natural-born citizen… Ted Cruz also taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law from 2004-09.