Ted Cruz

• 1. Introduction

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  Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, once held the Senate floor for 21 hours and filled part of that time by reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. He has served in the Senate since 2013. A Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, once called him "off-the-charts brilliant". A House Speaker, John Boehner, described him as "Lucifer in the flesh". Few politicians collect descriptions that far apart.

  He is a former national debating champion who argued before the Supreme Court. He is also a Tea Party insurgent who ran for president and then spent months refusing to back the man who beat him. This documentary asks where such a figure comes from. It asks what he argued in court, how he won his seat, and why so many fellow Republicans keep their distance. It also asks what happened when his political instincts met the crises of 2021 and 2025.

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• 2. Calgary to Harvard

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  Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, is where Rafael Edward Cruz was born on the 22nd of December 1970. His mother, Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson, had been born in Wilmington, Delaware. She had earned a mathematics degree from Rice University in the 1950s. His father, also named Rafael, grew up in Cuba. As a teenager in the 1950s he was beaten by agents of the dictator Fulgencio Batista for opposing the regime.

  In 1957 the elder Rafael left Cuba to study at the University of Texas at Austin. When his four-year student visa ran out, he obtained political asylum. By the time of his son's birth, the couple had lived in Calgary for three years. They owned a firm that processed seismic data for oil drilling. Cruz later described them as "two mathematicians/computer programmers".

  In 1974 Cruz's father moved to Texas alone. The couple reconciled later that year, and the family settled in Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters from his father's first marriage, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz. Miriam died in 2011 of a drug overdose. At age 13 he began calling himself "Ted".

  Houston supplied his schooling. He attended Awty International School for junior high, then two private high schools, Faith West Academy near Katy and Second Baptist High School. He graduated from Second Baptist as valedictorian in 1988. In high school he joined a Houston group then called the Free Market Education Foundation. It taught teenagers the ideas of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat.

  At Princeton University he studied public policy and joined the debate panel of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. In 1992 he won the top speaker award at both the U.S. National Debating Championship and the North American Debating Championship. The American Parliamentary Debate Association named him National Speaker of the Year. With his partner David Panton, he was also named Team of the Year. Princeton's debate team now names its annual novice championship after him.

  His 115-page senior thesis carried the title Clipping the Wings of Angels: The History and Theory Behind the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The title echoed a line attributed to James Madison in the 51st essay of the Federalist Papers: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Cruz argued that the last two items in the Bill of Rights were meant as an explicit barrier against an all-powerful state. He graduated cum laude in 1992.

  At Harvard Law School he held a John M. Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics. He was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. He also served as an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He and Panton represented Harvard at the 1995 World Debating Championship, where an Australian team beat them in the semifinals. He took his law degree magna cum laude in 1995, and a federal appeals judge named J. Michael Luttig was waiting to hire him as a clerk.

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• 3. The Courtroom Years

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  Chief Justice William Rehnquist employed Cruz as a Supreme Court law clerk from 1996 to 1997. That followed a year with Judge Luttig of the Fourth Circuit, from 1995 to 1996. In 1997 Cruz joined the firm Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, where he worked on matters involving the National Rifle Association. He also helped prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. In 1998 he was briefly among the lawyers representing Representative John Boehner in his suit against Representative Jim McDermott over a leaked recording of a phone call.

  In 1999 Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign as a domestic policy adviser. During the 2000 Florida recounts he helped assemble the legal team, shape strategy and draft filings for Bush v. Gore. He recruited the future chief justice John Roberts and the noted attorney Mike Carvin to that team. Once Bush took office, Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department. He then became director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission.

  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott appointed Cruz solicitor general in 2003. The office had existed since 1999 to handle appeals for the state government. Abbott wanted Cruz to take a "leadership role in the United States in articulating a vision of strict constructionism". Over the next five years Cruz argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning five and losing four. He wrote 70 Supreme Court briefs and gave 34 appellate oral arguments. No other practicing lawyer in Texas, and no sitting member of Congress, has appeared before the Court as often.

  Cruz later described the approach: "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." He drafted the amicus brief that 31 state attorneys general signed in District of Columbia v. Heller, urging the Court to strike down Washington's handgun ban. He won 5-4 in Van Orden v. Perry, which defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas Capitol grounds. He also led the defense of the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan, which prevailed 5-4 in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.

  In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, Cruz wrote a brief for all 50 states arguing that a non-custodial parent lacked standing to challenge the Pledge of Allegiance on his daughter's behalf. The Court upheld that position. The same year, the Texas attorney general's office declined to defend the state's sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas. The Supreme Court ruled that laws banning homosexual sex were unconstitutional.

  His most prized case was Medellín v. Texas. Fifty-one Mexican nationals on death row for murder argued that the United States had failed to tell them they could seek help from the Mexican consulate. The International Court of Justice had agreed in the Avena case, and the Bush administration backed the petitioners. Texas won 6-3, with the Court holding that the ICJ's decisions did not bind domestic law. Cruz has called it the most important case of his tenure.

  Not every case ended so cleanly. Michael Wayne Haley was arrested in 1997 for stealing a calculator from Walmart. Under the Texas habitual offender law he received a sentence of 16 1/2 years. Cruz declined to vacate it, saying, "I think justice is being done because he had a full and fair trial and an opportunity to raise his errors." At the Supreme Court he conceded that Haley had a very strong claim of ineffective counsel, and the case went back to the lower courts. Haley was re-sentenced to time served.

  In 2008 American Lawyer named Cruz one of the 50 best litigators under 45. The National Law Journal put him among the 50 most influential minority lawyers in America. In 2010 Texas Lawyer listed him among the 25 greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter century. By then he had left the state job for the Houston office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he led the firm's Supreme Court and national appellate practice.

  His clients there were mostly corporate. He represented Pfizer against public hospitals and health centers that accused it of overcharging. He worked on the appeal of the Chinese company Linglong Tire, which lost a $26 million judgment over tires based on stolen blueprints. For Toyota he argued a statute-of-limitations question before the Texas Supreme Court, losing once and then winning a second appeal on the same argument. He also defended two record-setting $54-million personal injury awards in New Mexico, and both settlements were sealed. In 2010 he dropped a bid for state attorney general, because his old boss Greg Abbott decided to seek reelection.

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• 4. Senate Races

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  On the 19th of January 2011, Cruz launched his Senate campaign through a blogger conference call. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had just announced she would not seek reelection. In the Republican primary he faced Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, who had a statewide office and outspent him $19 million to $7 million. Cruz had backing from Sarah Palin, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks for America, talk host Mark Levin and several senators including Rand Paul and Mike Lee. Former Attorney General Ed Meese served as national chairman.

  Cruz won the runoff by 14 points. The Washington Post called it "the biggest upset of 2012... a true grassroots victory against very long odds". In the general election on the 6th of November he beat Democrat Paul Sadler, a former state representative from Henderson, with 4.5 million votes, or 56.4 percent, against 3.2 million. His own pollster estimated he took 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas, ahead of Mitt Romney. He became the first Hispanic American to serve as a senator from Texas.

  Money questions followed. Time magazine reported that Cruz might have broken ethics rules by not disclosing a financial tie to Caribbean Equity Partners Investment Holdings. He called the omission inadvertent. In January 2016 The New York Times reported that he and his wife had borrowed nearly $1 million in low-interest loans from Goldman Sachs, where she worked, and from Citibank. He had listed them on his Senate disclosure forms in July 2012 but not with the Federal Election Commission. Nothing suggested the banks or his wife had done anything wrong.

  Cruz also chose to miss the deadline for repaying a loan to his own campaign. His aim was to challenge a law capping at $250,000 the personal loans that donors can repay after an election. In May 2022 the Supreme Court sided with him in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. That let him ask donors to help repay $555,000, made up of $545,000 from 2012 and $10,000 from 2018.

  The 2018 race was far closer. Cruz won the March 6 Republican primary with more than 80 percent of the vote. In November he faced Representative Beto O'Rourke in a contest that polls kept showing as tight. It became the most expensive Senate election in American history up to that point. Cruz won on the 6th of November, 50.9 percent to 48.3 percent.

  In 2024 he sought a third term and won on the 5th of November. His opponent was Colin Allred, a former NFL player and U.S. representative. Cruz took 53.1 percent to 44.5 percent. Since 2025 he has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee. That year he also drafted and led passage of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which Donald Trump signed into law.

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• 5. Fights in the Senate

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  Harry Reid blocked Cruz's 2013 filibuster attempt because only 18 Republican senators backed it. Before that, Cruz had persuaded the House, and Speaker John Boehner, to put a provision defunding the Affordable Care Act into the budget bill. Supporters cheered. Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government named him "2013 Person of the Year" in an op-ed in The Hill, and TheBlaze and The American Spectator both named him man of the year. Time magazine made him a finalist for its own Person of the Year.

  Critics, including Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, called the effort ineffective. Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 federal shutdown. Yet he cast several votes to prolong it, and many in his party blamed him for starting it.

  One bill of his drew a different reaction. On the 1st of April 2014 he introduced S. 2195. It would let the president deny visas to a UN ambassador found to have engaged in espionage or terrorism against the United States. It was a reply to Iran's choice of Hamid Aboutalebi, who had been involved in the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran. On the 18th of April, Cruz published a letter in Politico titled "A bipartisan message to Iran", thanking President Obama for signing it.

  That was an exception. In 2013 Cruz labeled Republicans he thought too soft on Obama the "surrender caucus". At a Tea Party rally he called colleagues "squishes" on gun control. John McCain denounced his reference to Nazis when discussing the Affordable Care Act. In March 2013 McCain called Cruz and some others "wacko birds". Lindsey Graham later said, "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you."

  In July 2015 Cruz accused Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of telling "a flat-out lie" about the Export-Import Bank. Reuters called the outburst unusual in the cordial atmosphere of the Senate. McCain said it was "outside the realm of Senate behavior". Orrin Hatch said he did not condone such language without definitive proof. Cruz has said he is proud of his reputation for having few allies, and he names Mike Lee of Utah among the few close ones. He has said he was vilified for fighting "the Washington cartel".

  The record of his committee work drew its own scrutiny. In his first two years he attended 17 of 50 public Armed Services hearings and 3 of 25 Commerce hearings. He attended 4 of 12 Judiciary hearings. In the first three months of 2015 he missed 21 of 135 roll call votes.

  His language about President Obama was sharper still. In a November 2014 speech he said Obama was "openly desirous to destroy the Constitution and this Republic". He also invoked the Roman senator Cicero's speeches against Catiline. Classics professor Jesse Weiner wrote in The Atlantic that the analogy implied Obama was an illegitimate president plotting a violent overthrow. After Cruz said the Iran nuclear agreement would make Obama's administration the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism, Obama called it an example of "outrageous attacks". Mitt Romney, who also opposed the deal, said the remark was "way over the line".

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• 6. Convictions and Causes

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  In June 2025 Cruz introduced an amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on behalf of the tech industry. It would have imposed a decade-long moratorium on state or federal attempts to regulate artificial intelligence. The Senate voted it down 99-1. The vote shows how his positions, though staunchly conservative, do not always carry his own party.

  Israel is one of his deepest commitments. Cruz said in 2025 that he first ran for the Senate in 2012 intending to be the leading defender of Israel there. Citing Genesis 12:3, he has said, "Biblically, we are commanded to support Israel". In June 2017 he co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. In October 2025 he warned about growing antisemitism on the right.

  On Iran, he has called the 2015 nuclear agreement "catastrophic" and "disastrous". During the Iran-Israel war in June 2025, he told Fox News that regime change was in America's interest. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he could not quote the Bible passage he cited or say where it appeared. Carlson also challenged him on the population of Iran, saying, "You don't know anything about the country whose government you want to overthrow".

  China has drawn his steady criticism. In early January 2017 he met Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen with Governor Greg Abbott and others. In August 2018 he joined 16 other lawmakers urging Global Magnitsky Act sanctions over the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In a letter to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, he accused the company of bowing to Beijing after it punished a Hong Kong gamer. The Chinese government sanctioned him on the 13th of July 2020 and again on the 10th of August 2020.

  At home, Cruz proposed abolishing the IRS in favor of a flat tax that would fit on a postcard. He promised to eliminate four other cabinet departments: Energy, Education, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development. On climate, he rejects the scientific consensus. In March 2015 he said satellite measurements showed no significant warming in 18 years, contrary to NASA's analysis. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a lifetime score of 3 percent. OpenSecrets counts more than $2.5 million in campaign money from oil, gas and coal interests since 2012.

  His record on disasters has been argued over. In 2013 he voted against Hurricane Sandy aid, calling it filled with "unrelated pork". The Washington Post disputed that. The New York Times found that all but one of 23 examples his spokesman provided were related to Sandy or to future storms. In 2015 he supported federal aid after Texas floods, and in 2017 he called for federal help as Hurricane Harvey approached.

  On guns, he opposes new regulations. After the Robb Elementary School shooting in May 2022, he blamed declining church attendance, violent video games and cyberbullying, among other factors. He voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. He met gun control advocates Alyssa Milano and Fred Guttenberg, and Guttenberg called the meeting "a really important day".

  He also pressed the fight over Russia's Nord Stream II pipeline. In December 2019 he and Senator Ron Johnson warned the owner of the pipe-laying firm Allseas about sanctions. Allseas suspended its work a few days later, but other vessels finished the job. On the 4th of June 2021, Vladimir Putin announced that the first line was complete.

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• 7. The Trump Rivalry

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  On the 23rd of March 2015, Cruz stood at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and announced his run for president. He posted on Twitter at the same hour: "I'm running for President and I hope to earn your support!" He was the first major Republican to enter the 2016 race. Years of groundwork had come first. He gave the keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2013 and won the Values Voter Summit straw poll with 42 percent that October. HarperCollins published his book A Time for Truth on the 30th of June 2015.

  His first real test came on the 1st of February 2016. He won the Iowa caucuses with 28 percent, becoming the first Hispanic American to win a presidential primary or caucus. He placed third in New Hampshire, with about 12 percent, and third in South Carolina, with about 22.3 percent. On Super Tuesday he took Texas by 17 points, plus Alaska and Oklahoma. He then beat the front-runner Donald Trump by 25 points in Kansas.

  The wins kept coming. On the 22nd of March he took Utah with 69.2 percent of the vote and all 40 of its delegates. On the 6th of April he won Wisconsin with 48.2 percent to Trump's 35.1 percent. He swept Colorado's conventions, taking all 34 delegates. By the end he had 12 states, more than 7.8 million votes and 559 delegates. His campaign raised nearly $92 million, a record for a Republican primary candidate, and drew more than 325,000 volunteers. He named Carly Fiorina as his intended running mate on the 27th of April.

  On the 3rd of May 2016, Cruz called Trump "a pathological liar" who "lies...practically every word that comes out of his mouth". Trump beat him overwhelmingly in Indiana that day, and Cruz suspended his campaign. Questions about his eligibility had trailed him throughout. His mother had told him she would need to formally request Canadian citizenship for him, so the family assumed he had none. After the Dallas Morning News pointed out his dual citizenship in August 2013, he renounced it. He ceased to be a Canadian citizen on the 14th of May 2014. Lawsuits and ballot challenges failed, and the Illinois Board of Elections ruled in February 2016 that he was a natural born citizen.

  On the 20th of July 2016, Cruz addressed the Republican National Convention and congratulated Trump without endorsing him. He told listeners to "vote your conscience". The crowd booed. The next day he told Texas delegates, "I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father." He endorsed Trump on the 23rd of September. After the release of the 2005 audio recording of Trump, he reaffirmed his support and called Hillary Clinton "manifestly unfit to be president". The billionaire Mercer family, including Robert and his daughter Rebekah, had backed Cruz's campaign.

  Cruz later became an important Trump ally in the Senate. He praised Neil Gorsuch as "brilliant and immensely talented". In 2018 he wrote Trump's entry in the Time 100 list, saying Trump was "doing what he was elected to do: disrupt the status quo". Reports said Trump considered Cruz for attorney general in 2016, but the job went to Jeff Sessions. In September 2020 Trump put Cruz on a Supreme Court shortlist with Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley. Cruz declined consideration.

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• 8. After the Election

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  Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after the 2020 election. It argued that the state constitution required in-person voting except in narrow cases. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had already rejected that argument. Cruz backed the appeal, and the justices declined to take it up. He later led a group of Republican senators in an effort to refuse to count Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes, citing allegations of fraud that were baseless.

  Cruz also agreed to Trump's request to argue the Paxton suit, which sought to nullify results in four states, should it reach the Court. It never did. He gathered ten other senators behind a plan by his longtime friend, Trump attorney John Eastman. It would delay certification of the electoral vote by ten days so legislatures in six states Biden had won could consider alternate slates. Cruz said he was "leading the charge".

  On the 6th of January 2021, Cruz said 39 percent of Americans believed the election was rigged, adding, "I am not arguing for setting aside the result of this election". An Ipsos spokesman noted that only 28 percent thought illegal voting or rigging had decided the outcome. Some observers believe Cruz knew the fraud claims were inaccurate and spoke to mislead for political gain. A mob then stormed the Capitol, and five people died, including a police officer. That evening Cruz voted to object to Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes. The Senate rejected the objections 93-6 and 92-7.

  The backlash was swift. The Texas Democratic Party and the Houston Chronicle called for him to resign, and the San Antonio Express-News urged his expulsion. Thousands of lawyers and law students called for his disbarment. Biden and Republican Senator Pat Toomey said he was complicit in the "big lie". Chad Sweet, chair of Cruz's 2016 campaign, accused him of an "assault on our democracy". Several corporations halted donations, and his communications director, Lauren Blair Bianchi, resigned.

  On the 28th of May 2021, Cruz voted against an independent commission to investigate the riot. On the eve of the anniversary, a video caught him calling it a "violent terrorist attack". Tucker Carlson criticized him on air that night. The next night Cruz went on Carlson's show and called his own remark "frankly dumb" and "sloppy". CNN reported he had used the word terrorism for the attack at least 17 times in the previous year.

  A different crisis came in February 2021. During a historic winter storm, up to 4.3 million Texans lost power. Cruz and his family boarded a plane for Cancún and a stay at the Ritz Carlton. Heidi Cruz had described their home in a text message as "FREEZING". Cruz asked Houston police to escort the family through the airport. Reporters saw the family poodle, Snowflake, alone in the dark house. Cruz said he was being a "good dad" to his daughters. He flew back the same day, and protesters met him at his house.

  In July 2025 he was vacationing in Greece when the Central Texas floods began. His office said he returned "as fast as humanly possible". But he visited the Parthenon the day after a flash flood on the Guadalupe River killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and camp counselors. Cruz later inserted language into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that eliminated $150 million for weather-forecasting research and public dissemination. Environmental groups criticized the cut.

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