Posted on 06/06/2014 4:33:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz recalls that the Declaration of Independence listed 28 specific legal grievances against King George III of England. His list of "particulars" against President Obama goes up to 76 - and counting.
To Cruz, a Texas Republican known for his vocal opposition to the president, that is not an exercise in historical trivia. It's become a major focus of his Senate office, where he has harnessed his Harvard Law skills to further his narrative of a "lawless" presidency.
Long before the congressional furor over the legality of Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap in Afghanistan, Cruz, a potential 2016 presidential contender, was compiling a legal brief questioning the Obama administration's use of executive power.
Policy differences with the White House are hardly new in Washington. But Cruz has made a name for himself as a leading lawyer for the conservative movement, battling the Obama agenda on health care, crime and immigration - not by passing laws, but by challenging Obama edicts in the legal arena.
Call it Ted Cruz, Of Counsel.
"Senator Cruz is among the most vocal and energetic advocates for limited constitutional government in our Congress," said Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative-leaning Federalist Society. "There's no one in Congress who has been more systematic in cataloguing and critiquing federal branch overreach."
The former Texas solicitor general is often portrayed as an ideological bomb-thrower who shut down the federal government during a budget fight over the Obama's health care overhaul.
But in his first 18 months in the Senate, Cruz, 43, also has cultivated a following in academic circles for his legal work on the limits of federal authority, a cause that has adherents on both the political left and right....
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonchronicle.com ...
So basically it says: “OMG, this guy actually means this stuff, how crazy is that?”
Good summation.
Get Congress to take some responsibility. And start doing their collective job....
I can't speak for his executive skills, but no other 2016 candidate will beat Cruz in constitutional debate.
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.[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
Cruz is the real deal
Ping.
Name one leftist who "adheres" to that cause.
I dare you.
Unless Cruz intends to go full dictator after he is elected POTUS and basically eliminates the influence of the federal judiciary and Congress, nothing will be solved.
The political class is DC is united against the interests of those outside the Capital, extorting money from our paychecks, skimming off the top, and wasting the rest.
Obama has paved the way to dictatorship, now the right needs to step up and give it back to the degenerate marxist crooks one thousand fold, eliminating any possibility of these leftist scumbags ever to launch a counter attack.
Saving this Republic will take balls.
I think he means people like Gnome Chomsky, Glen Greenwald, Ralph Nader and that ilk.
Too bad the rest of your senators are so lazy or ignorant or both that they are happy to let the nation be destroyed as long as it doesn’t affect their pension.
Shame on you people for voting for relics of a long-gone age, such as McConnell and Cochran. You either fight for your nation at the ballot box or with the bullet box. Which one do you choose?
Yes, his resume is stunning. No wonder so many lesser men feel threatened. The nation has received an awesome blessing in Sen. Ted Cruz.
By the way, let’s see Obama’s resume and do a little comparing. It shouldn’t take long.
Well, aren't we the high and mighty one?
Did you elect Cruz all by yourself?
Or are you disparaging the other 56 states because they didn't elect a Cruz?
Or are you simply doing a bit of Texas bragging? 'Cuz Texas has such a rich history of senatorial conservatism....Cornyn, Hutchison, Bentson, LBJ. Yup, quite a lineup you got there, Tex.
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