Texas Goes to Washington
By-Tanner Giles
“Texas works.” In his victory speech, Ted Cruz recognized that “the New York Times even let it slip that ‘Texas is the future.’” In a Republican runoff comparable only to the campaigns of Obama, Romney and Paul, in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat Senator in over two decades, Cruz was able to unite TEA Party and libertarian grassroots groups and defeat the Lieutenant Governor of nine years, veteran of the Air Force and CIA, and entrepreneur in the oil and gas industry, with a 57-43% margin. Though Cruz and Dewhurst are both “Conservative Republicans”, their similarities in policy and definition of “conservative” end at repealing every word of the PPACA.
Cruz’s campaign can be summed up in six words: liberty, prosperity, sovereignty and the Constitution. His record indicates he’s successfully led the fight for national and state sovereignty against the U.N. and the World Court. As an advocate of free markets, he opposes tax increases and deficit spending; he supports eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the IRS. As a leader in the fight for liberty, Cruz opposes the NDAA and has pledged to cosponsor Audit the Fed (S. 202).
In Washington, Senate Majority Leader Reid refuses to bring S. 202 up for vote, and while the bill has twenty-seven cosponsors, there are still Republicans who have yet to co-sponsor it, including Senator Hutchison whom Cruz will replace. In the House, on the other hand, requiring a veto-proof majority, or 288/432, H.R. 459 had 274 cosponsors and passed 327-98, with only one Republican voting No, and eighty-nine Democrats voting alongside 238 Republicans in support of the bill.
After watching the debates, it’s clear that the fight isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, it’s between liberty and tyranny. At this critical time in our nation’s history, when every day the President, or the U.N., or some special interest group or bureaucrat is pushing some legislation to invade our privacy, or criminalize certain firearms or even certain ammo sales, or fund another company, program, or war, at the expense of higher taxes, increased inflation, or more debt, with disdain for the Constitution, I’d rather have a patriot like Dennis Kucinich in Washington, someone actually standing in opposition to tyranny, uniting Democrats on his side of the aisle to fight alongside Republicans on a daily basis, than a politician like Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison who rose in opposition to S. 2105 only because the vote was “premature”.
The most glaring difference between Cruz and progressive Republicans like Dewhurst and Hutchison is on foreign policy. Dewhurst believes “the Obama administration was too anxious to cut and run” when it came to Iraq. He supports this claim with, in his view, the need to keep troops in the region longer to continue training Iraqi forces, as well as seizing the opportunity for the U.S. to gain intelligence and combat Al Qaeda and Taliban forces “hidden in Pakistan… immune from retaliation other than the occasional drone.” Though recent information suggests Al Qaeda is fighting with the U.N. backed FSA, Dewhurst does support the overthrow of the Syrian Government claiming “Assad is committing genocide.”
Contrarily, Cruz defines the platform Texans elected as “that of Ronald Reagan,” and refuses to acknowledge the U.N.’s jurisdiction. He insists, “The key on all of these questions is to go back to the Constitution. None of the questions are hard if you have a firm foundation in the decisions our founding fathers reached over 200 years ago. George Washington famously observed to ‘Beware of foreign entanglements.’” Advocating the Weinberger Doctrine and opposing ‘nation building,’ he sustains “The job of the men and women in our military is not to build democratic utopias across the world. The job of the United States is not to be the world’s policemen. We don’t have the resources, and it’s not our job to intervene all over the globe.”
Granted the Lt. Gov. received the endorsements of Republican leaders Gov. Perry and former Gov. Huckabee, Cruz was awarded the endorsements of former Gov. Palin, former Sen. Santorum, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, as well as Senators Coburn, Lee, Toomey and DeMint, and Dr.’s Ron and Rand Paul, reflecting the unison of TEA Party and libertarian grassroots groups necessary for Cruz to win the nomination in Texas.
As the New York Times stated, “Texas is the future,” and in the state that hasn’t elected a Democrat Senator since ‘88, this race foreshadowed the looming battle of ideas within the GOP; a battle that will be won when TEA Party and libertarian grassroots unite, and will end with the restoration of the Constitution. The GOP will witness in Tampa what I saw in Fort Worth, that a lot of Texas delegates support Cruz’s platform. A lot. More than 57%.
