GeneralLast Updated on 2 months by General
Ted Cruz Biography
Ted Cruz (Rafael Edward) is an American politician and attorney. Since 2013 he has been serving as the junior United States Senator for Texas. In 2016 election he was the runner-up for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
Ted is a holder of degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He held various government positions from 1999 to 2003, serving as Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Department, and as a Domestic Policy Advisor to George W. Bush during Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
From 2003 to 2008 he served as Solicitor General of Texas having been appointed by Texas Attorney General and later Governor Greg Abbott. He is know to be the longest-serving solicitor general in Texas history and the first Hispanic American to serve in that capacity. Ted was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin from 2004 to 2009, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation.
Ted ran for and won the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison in 2012. Ted is the first Hispanic American to serve as a U.S. Senator from Texas. He ran for President of the United States in 2016, , winning Republican contests in 12 states before withdrawing from the race.
Ted in 2018 he was reelected to the Senate defeating Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by a margin of 50.9% to 48.3% in the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. Along with Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio, Ted is one of three current U.S. Senators of Cuban descent.
Ted Cruz Age |How Old Is Ted Cruz
Ted was born on December 22, 1970 at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta. He is 48 years old as of 2018.
Ted Cruz Nationality | Ted Cruz Citizenship |Ted Cruz Ethnicity | Where Was Ted Cruz Born | Ted Cruz Birthplace
Ted was born Rafael Edward Cruz at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta. Ted has stated that when he was a child, his mother told him that she would have to make an affirmative act to claim Canadian citizenship for him, so his family assumed that he did not hold Canadian citizenship. After the Dallas Morning News pointed out that Cruz had dual Canadian-American citizenship in August 2013, he applied to formally renounce his Canadian citizenship and ceased being a citizen of Canada on May 14, 2014.
Several lawsuits and ballot challenges asserting that Cruz is ineligible to become U.S. president have been filed. No lawsuit or challenge has been successful, and in February 2016, the Illinois Board of Elections ruled in Cruz’s favor, stating, “The candidate is a natural born citizen by virtue of being born in Canada to his mother who was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth.”
Ted Cruz Family | Ted Cruz Parents | Young Ted Cruz
Ted was born Rafael Edward Cruz at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta. He is the son of Eleanor Elizabeth (née Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz. His mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.
When Ted was being born his parents had lived in Calgary for three years. They were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Ted has said that he is the son of “two mathematicians/computer programmers.” His father left the family and moved to Texas in 1974 . Later in that same year, his parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. Ted’s parents divorced in 1997.He has two siblings two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. His sister Miriam died in 2011.
Ted Cruz Father
His father was born and raised in Cuba. In 1957 he to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the U.S. after his four-year student visa expired. In 1973 he earned Canadian citizenship and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005.
Ted Cruz Education | Ted Cruz Harvard
Cruz went to two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988.
During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat.
In 1992 Ted graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In Princeton, Ted 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.
He was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year in 1992, and, with his debate partner David Panton, Team of the Year by the American Parliamentary Debate Association. The two later represented Harvard Law School at the 1995 World Debating Championship, losing in the semifinals to a team from Australia. Princeton’s debate team named their annual novice championship after Cruz.
After he graduated from Princeton, Tedfwent to Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree. At Harvard Law, Ted was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. Referring to Cruz’s time as a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant”. At Harvard Law, Cruz was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.
Cruz serves on the Board of Advisors of the Texas Review of Law and Politics.
Ted Cruz Daughter | Ted Cruz Wife
Cruz married Heidi Nelson on May 27, 2001; they have two daughters, Caroline and Catherine. The couple met when Cruz was working on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Heidi took leave from her position as head of the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in 2016 to support Ted Cruz’s run for the U.S. president. She previously worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice and in New York as an investment banker.
Ted Cruz Website
Visit Senate website
Ted Cruz Campaign
The 2016 presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, the junior United States Senator from Texas, was announced on March 23, 2015. He was a candidate for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination and won the second-most state contests and delegates. Cruz themed his campaign around being an outsider and a strict conservative. In the crowded early field, he chose not to directly confront the leading candidate, Donald Trump, who was also viewed as an outsider candidate. His cordial and sympathetic tone towards Trump contrasted with the more critical approach of rivals such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul. Had Cruz been elected, he would have been the first Cuban U.S. president, the first U.S. president born in Canada and the first U.S. president born in a country outside of the United States
Ted Cruz Policies | Ted Cruz Political Party
As a member of the Republican Party, Ted Cruz is a United States Senator representing the state of Texas, and a 2016 candidate for US President.
Cruz has been described as a movement conservative, a religious conservative and a constitutional conservative with libertarian leanings.
Ted Cruz Election| Ted Cruz Reelection | Ted Cruz Senate Race
Ted in 2018 ran for reelection to a second term. On March 6, 2018 the primary elections for both parties were held. Ted easily won the Republican nomination with over 80% of the vote. In the general election he faced the Democratic nominee, U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke. The contest was unusually competitive for an election in Texas, with most polls showing Cruz only slightly ahead of O’Rourke. The race received significant media attention and became the most expensive U.S. Senate election in history.
Cruz defeated O’Rourke on November 6, 2018, by a margin of 50.9% to 48.3%.
Ted Cruz Trump
Ted won his widest margin up to that point in Kansas, where he beat frontrunner Donald Trump by 25 points. After his victories over Trump in Texas, Kansas, and Maine, Ted established himself as the candidate with the best opportunity to defeat Trump, the leading contender for the nomination.
Ted won the Idaho primary on March 8, 2016 with 45% of vote—defeating Trump by 17% and earning his seventh statewide victory. He placed second in Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii. Ted won the Wyoming county conventions on March 12, 2016 with 67% of the vote and 9 delegates, giving him his eighth statewide win.
Ted Cruz Immigration
Ted adopted a “hard-line stance” on immigration issues during the 2014 border crisis and is an opponent of comprehensive immigration reform. He advocates for an increase from 65,000 to 325,000 annually in skilled foreign workers entering the United States using H-1B visas.
Ted staked out “hard-right immigration stances”according to McClatchy, during his 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination for President.
He opposes providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children (so-called DREAMers). He was the sole Senator in February 2018, to oppose a Republican motion to begin debate on legislation intended to resolve the question of what to do with DREAMers.
He has called for the repeal of the clause of the 14th amendment, which grants citizenship to those born in the United States.
Ted defended the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. He also blamed the migrant parents for crossing the US border to seek asylum and argued that the Obama administration had the same policy.
Ted Cruz President | Ted Cruz Presidential Campaign
Ted announced on March 23, 2015,his 2016 presidential candidacy for the GOP primaries and caucuses, in a morning speech delivered at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. At the same hour, he posted on his Twitter page: “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!”
Ted for the 2016 campaign he was the first announced major Republican presidential candidate . In the primary campaign, his base of support was mainly among social conservatives, though he had crossover appeal to other factions within his party, including in particular libertarian conservatives.
Ted Cruz Trump Judicial Nominee
During a confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday 5 February 2019 for Neomi Rao, President Trump’s nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sen. Ted Cruz blasted Democrats for questioning the nominee’s personal religious views. Earlier, Sen. Cory Booker had asked Rao if she believes gay marriage is a sin.
SEN. TED CRUZ: The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be a theater for mischaracterizing or twisting nominees’ records or views, nor should it be an avenue for persecution.
We’ve seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith. I have to say, I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee, asking your personal views on what is sinful.
In my view that has no business in this committee. Article Six of the Consitution says there should be no religious test for any public office. We have also seen Senate Democrats attack what they have characterized as religious dogma, we’ve seen Senate Democrats attack nominees for their own personal views on salvation.
I don’t believe this is a theological court of inquisition. I think the proper avenue of investigation is a nominee’s record. So let’s look at your record, which is what this committee should be looking at, not our own personal religious views, or your religious views, whatever they may be.
Ted Cruz just compared rape victims to a man who climbed on a train and electrocuted himself.
On Tuesday, President Trump’s D.C. Circuit Court nominee Neomi Rao faced a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A slew of Democrats, joined by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa), made sure to question Rao on her past writings that suggested “intoxicated women were partly responsible for date rape,” CBS News notes. And while Rao apologized for and recanted those views on Tuesday, Cruz still seemed to come to her defense.
Cruz, for some reason invoking his 8- and 10-year-old daughters, said he likes to advise college students “not to drink to excess.” Any student who does so “risks being a victim, risks being vulnerable,” Cruz added. He then recalled a fellow student in college “who who drank to excess and then tragically got on top of a train and electrocuted himself,” adding that the student “lost three of his limbs.”
Rao was nominated to fill the spot vacated by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and currently runs the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In an opinion column written when she was in college, Rao said unless a woman’s drinks were “forced … down her throat,” drinking “to the point where she can no longer choose” is “part of her choice.”
Rao on Tuesday said she “cringe[s]” while “looking back at some of those writings,” and added that she has “matured as a thinker and a writer and indeed as a person.”