Mike Huckabee vowed that he “will not acquiesce to any imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch.”
.. Cruz is pressing forward with his plan to provide “the means [of] throwing off judicial tyrants”: a constitutional amendment that would subject Supreme Court justices to a national “retention election” every eight years.
.. Cruz is not just posturing; he is stoking a pervasive and potentially destructive strain of anti-court sentiment within the G.O.P. He is not just attacking particular opinions or judges; he is attacking the judiciary itself as inherently unrepresentative, unaccountable, and in need of restraint. The same mindset can be seen in Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s threat to wipe out funding for the state judiciary if the state Supreme Court defies him and strikes down a law restricting its own authority.
Ted Cruz Honed Political Skills in Princeton Debate Club
In debates, Mr. Cruz, who declined to comment for this article, almost always took the lead government or opposition positions, and he often chopped the air as he called on what Mr. Panton described as a photographic memory. Without notes, he employed his trademark strategy.
“Ted was not about responding to anything,” Mr. Panton said. “He would reframe the whole debate.”
.. “Nobody was better at setting traps,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, a Yale debater who became a leading economist for President Obama. He recalled Mr. Cruz’s attempts to control debates with carefully constructed arguments that always seemed to anticipate his opponents’ rebuttals.
But Mr. Goolsbee and other top debaters on the circuit who frequently beat Mr. Cruz discovered it was easy to get under his skin, especially with humor. “It would unravel him,” Mr. Goolsbee said.
Ted Cruz and the New Politics of Texas
For much of the modern age Texans complained vociferously about interference from Washington, but for most of that time folks around here knew that was just rhetorical hypocrisy. In fact, Texas politicians have historically been downright passionate about government (the pork part, at least). How else did we get something like NASA in our own backyard? The oil depletion allowance? Military bases? Remembering who sent them to Washington kept senators like Lloyd Bentsen, Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison in office for decades.
.. Mr. Cruz, in contrast, takes his anti-government tirades seriously, and he doesn’t care when he alienates and infuriates members of his own party. He still takes full credit for being the last holdout in the government shutdown of 2013. L.B.J. gave us Medicare; Mr. Cruz wants to obliterate Obamacare. Mr. Cruz says he would never vote against his beliefs — which automatically puts him in conflict with several million people, commonly known as constituents, and may also explain why he’s missed so many votes.
.. In the G.O.P. primary runoff last year, turnout was tiny (about 750,000 people) and the voters were disproportionately older, white, deeply conservative and highly organized. This is the group Ted Cruz targeted early on. In 2012, he calculated that if he made the rounds of Tea Party meetings and evangelical churches he could win a Senate race against a sitting lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, who couldn’t be bothered to campaign, and he was right.
Ted Cruz Is Not Afraid to Lose
Like Cruz, Goldwater was extreme, and as he said, in one of his best-known speeches, he didn’t consider this a vice. His extremism was not simply of the small-government variety, although that is what those who venerate him tend to invoke. He mused about letting NATO commanders use atomic weapons on the battlefield according to their own judgement.
.. “Ted with nukes, Ted with nukes, let’s see,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on Monday, at the Council on Foreign Relations. He stroked his chin theatrically; the C.F.R. members in the room were already laughing. (I was the moderator at the event, and had asked about his confidence in a President Cruz’s handling of a nuclear crisis.) How about the other possible nominees, including Scott Walker, who has said that his fights with labor unions have prepared him to confront ISIS with nuclear weapons?