Cruz steering Texas Republicans further right in primary fights

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - The longest shadow in Tuesday's primary election in Texas is being cast by a politician not even in the running, freshman U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican.

Cruz, just two years into his first major elected office, has arguably become the most loved politician among Republicans in Texas, an incubator for national conservative policies where the party dominates the statehouse and has not lost a statewide race since 1994.

A host of Republican hopefuls are trying to ride his coattails, turning campaigns into raucous affairs about how much they despise Obamacare, embrace the constitutional right to bear arms and see a need to raise alarms about illegal immigration.

Cruz has turned an already right-leaning Texas Republican Party even further to the right, analysts said.

Education

Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,[26] and later graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston as valedictorian in 1988.[11] During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group called the Free Market Education Foundation where Cruz learned about free-market economic philosophers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises.[20] The program was run by Rolland Storey and Cruz entered the program at the age of 13.[18]

Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1992.[2][5] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society’s Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.[27] In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton).[27] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship, making him Princeton’s highest-ranked debater at the championship.[28][29] Princeton’s debate team later named their annual novice championship after Cruz.[28]

Cruz’s senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled “Clipping the Wings of Angels,” draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to President James Madison: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect the rights of their constituents, and the last two items in the Bill of Rights offered an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz wrote: “They simply do so from different directions. The Tenth stops new powers, and the Ninth fortifies all other rights, or non-powers.”[24][30]

After graduating from Princeton, Cruz attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor.[2][31] While at Harvard Law, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.[5] Referring to Cruz’s time as a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.”[12][32][33][34][35][36] At Harvard Law, Cruz was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.[37]

Cruz currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Texas Review of Law and Politics.[37][38]

Legal career

Clerkships

Cruz served as a law clerk to J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1995[4][37] and William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States in 1996.[2] Cruz was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.[39]

Private practice

After Cruz finished his clerkships, he took a position with Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, which is now known as Cooper & Kirk, LLC, from 1997 to 1998.[40]

In 1998, Cruz served as private counsel for Congressman John Boehner during Boehner’s lawsuit against Congressman Jim McDermott for releasing a tape recording of a Boehner telephone conversation.[41]

Bush Administration

Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser, advising then-Governor George W. Bush on a wide range of policy and legal matters, including civil justice, criminal justice, constitutional law, immigration, and government reform.[40]

Cruz assisted in assembling the Bush legal team, devise strategy, and draft pleadings for filing with the Supreme Court of Florida and U.S. Supreme Court, the specific case being Bush v. Gore, during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts, leading to two successful decisions for the Bush team.[37][42]

After President Bush took office, Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department[2][42] and as the director of policy planning at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.[2][12][42]

Texas Solicitor General

Appointed to the office of Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott,[4][43] Cruz served in that position from 2003 to 2008.[20][37]

Cruz has authored more than 80 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.[4][12][22] Cruz’s record of having argued before the Supreme Court nine times is more than any practicing lawyer in Texas or any current member of Congress.[44] Cruz has commented on his nine cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court: “We ended up year after year arguing some of the biggest cases in the country. There was a degree of serendipity in that, but there was also a concerted effort to seek out and lead conservative fights.”[44]

In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by attorneys general of 31 states, which said that the D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.[22][45] Cruz also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.[22][46]

In addition to his success in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the constitutionality of Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 5-4 in Van Orden v. Perry.[12][22][37]

In 2004, Cruz was involved in another high-profile case, which was Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow.[12][37] In Newdow, Cruz wrote a U.S. Supreme Court brief on behalf of all 50 states which argued that a non-custodial parent does not have standing in court to sue to stop a public school from requiring its students to recite of the Pledge of Allegiance.[12][37] The Supreme Court upheld the position of Cruz’s brief in a 9-0 decision.

Cruz served as lead counsel for the state and successfully defended the multiple litigation challenges to the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan in state and federal district courts and before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 5-4 in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.[37][47]

Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States.[4][12][22][37]

Cruz has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America,[43][48] by The National Law Journal as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,[49][50] and by Texas Lawyer as one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.[51][52]

Private practice

After leaving the Solicitor General position in 2008, he worked in a private law firm in Houston, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, often representing corporate clients, until he was sworn in a U.S. Senator from Texas in 2013.[24][37][53] At Morgan, Lewis, he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice.[53]

In 2009, while working for Morgan, Lewis, Cruz formed and then abandoned a bid for state attorney general when the incumbent Attorney General Greg Abbott, who hired Cruz as Solicitor General, decided to run for re-election.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz

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