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At noon, 1,146 days ago, President Obama placed his hand on the Bible and swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Sadly, he has not lived up to his oath.

Indeed, for the last three years, President Obama has treated the Constitution as more of an irrelevance than as the Supreme Law of the Land.

Last week, channeling the specter of FDR, he brazenly tried to bully the Supreme Court into abdicating its duty to the Constitution. In the face of public outcry, he quickly backed away, and the attorney general was forced to send a federal appellate court a written “never mind.” But the shot across the bow of the Court was not unintentional.

This administration is engaged in a systematic effort to draw power into Washington, to expand federal government control of the economy and our lives. From Obamacare to Dodd-Frank to cap-and-trade to the NLRB’s abuse of Boeing, virtually every policy of the Obama administration expands federal government power over our economy.

Texas Republican David Dewhurst has been the leading candidate to replace retiring senator Kay Bailey Hutchison for the last year. Dewhurst, a wealthy Houston-born businessman who served in the Air Force and CIA, has been lieutenant governor since 2003, making him second only to governor Rick Perry in influence and name recognition among statewide Republicans. Dewhurst’s [...]

While most politics-watchers eyeball the Republican presidential contest, a fascinating GOP primary race is shaping up in Texas, where a U.S. Senate seat is up for grabs on May 29 as Kay Bailey Hutchison retires.

Former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, with Tea Party support, is taking on Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the establishment-favored candidate. Cruz, without big TV money but with persistence similar to that of Rick Santorum visiting every county in Iowa, has moved from little-known to contender: One recent poll shows Dewhurst with 38 percent of Republicans, Cruz with 27 percent, and two other candidates in single digits.

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Ted Cruz is running in the May 29 Texas Republican primary in the hope of ultimately replacing retiring Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. He was designated as “the next great conservative hope” on the cover of National Reviewmagazine. So, it’s important to understand how he thinks about the economy.

Republicans are going to have to offer positive economic growth programs if they are to win control of the House, the Senate, and the White House in November. Mr. Cruz has put forward a 12-point “jobs and growth” plan, so let’s score his proposals on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 representing perfection.

1. Repeal Obamacare. The massive cost and uncertainty it has imposed on small business is crippling job creation.

Score: 10. For Republicans, repealing Obamacare is the minimum ante for November’s political poker game. Obamacare is an economic tsunami heading right for us.

Even worse, however, is that Obamacare is designed to kill and disable Americans by suppressing medical progress. It has already dried up venture capital financing for new drug and medical device startups. This means that even if Obamacare is repealed on January 21, 2013, some Americans will end up suffering and/or dying because of it. Medical research takes time, and the time lost to Obamacare will never be recovered.

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At a packed tea party meeting at the Los Cucos restaurant in Kingwood, U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz got laughs when he called the venue a fitting one. “I’m sure they would find it appropriate that we’re meeting in a restaurant called ‘cuckoos,’ because they think we’re nuts,” Cruz said. “They view what we’re doing [...]

How does a man who is part Cuban, part Italian, and part Irish end up a Southern Baptist?

“I come from a family that has been Roman Catholic for generations,” Ted Cruz admitted, “but my parents converted while living in Texas and raised me Southern Baptist.”

The conservative candidate for United States Senate in Texas and former state Solicitor General told me he is not particularly concerned with the crime of being Christian, so to say, but the evidence. “I am always skeptical of politicians who say, ‘I’m running because God told me to.’ My view as a voter is: ‘When God tells me to vote for you, we’ll be on the same page.’”

As of late, Texans have been on Cruz’s page. And it’s quite a page to read.

“Talk is cheap,” Cruz says, “we need principled conservatives who are accomplished fighters,” and perhaps hereditary ones as well. At the age of fourteen, Cruz’s father, Rafael fought in the Cuban revolution. He was jailed, tortured, and has the veneers — the top row of his teeth having been kicked in — to prove it.

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Originally published by Politicalistas:

I’ve proudly been a member of “Bloggers for Cruz” supporting Ted Cruz’s campaign for U.S. Senate since last summer. I’ve seen him at countless events throughout Texas and our great nation. Tea Party events, Republican Women’s Club meetings, the Texas Straw Poll, Empower Texan’s Senate debate, and CPAC last year and again this year. Ted repeatedly proves his dedication to meet with us, listen to us and talk with us about the importance of what our next Senator from Texas should do to put our country back on track to prosperity

Just yesterday, the North Texas Tea Party released their February poll numbers from their membership regarding the US Senate Race and Ted led the dominated the candidates, winning with 57.5% of the vote. Wow. Just wow.

The final results were as follows:

• Glenn Addison 2.2%
• Andrew Castanuela 0.0%
• Curt Cleaver 0.0%
• Ted Cruz 57.5%
• David Dewhurst 6.0%
• Tom Leppert 7.5%
• Lela Pittenger 4.5%
• Undecided 18.9%
• Other 2.2%
• Total 100%

Read the rest of the post at Politicalistas.

Originally published by American Spectator:

It was yet another embarrassing spectacle of Republicans squabbling over who was for big government first. Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri acting as a surrogate for Mitt Romney, took Rick Santorum to task for voting for Medicare Part D while in the Senate in 2003.

Medicare Part D was indeed an egregious example of federal government growth. It added at least $7 trillion to the already substantial unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system. The deficit-financed prescription drug benefit was also the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. On a media conference call, Talent described it as a “big expansion of a federal entitlement.”

According to reporters who were on the call, Talent went so far as to say Santorum’s Medicare Part D vote placed him in the “liberal wing of the Republican Party” on fiscal issues. There was just one problem: Talent also voted for Medicare Part D. Talent later toldthe Weekly Standard‘s Michael Warren that the senators’ Bush-era Medicare votes could “be explained or justified” and that Romneycare was “on balance, a conservative measure” that had the Heritage Foundation’s backing at the time.

The moral of this story: Republicans generally do a very good job of promoting fiscal conservatism when the Democrats are in power. Yet when they control the White House and Congress, Republicans have a tendency to lose their way. They are the party of the Paul Ryan budget under Barack Obama but the party of Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and Romneycare under GOP chief executives.

Whatever happens in the presidential election, someone will need to resist big spending whether it comes from liberal Democrats or leap-year conservatives. One candidate who recognizes this need is Ted Cruz, who is running for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas. Cruz told this writer that having the right party label isn’t good enough.

“Texas is too Republican a state to settle for anything less than a conservative leader,” Cruz says. Even casting the right votes and getting high ratings from conservative groups isn’t as important as rocking the boat. Cruz argues that the solution is electing a critical mass of committed constitutional conservatives.

Cruz identifies Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee as examples of what he is talking about (he notes that all three senators have endorsed him in his primary). He also points to Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey, suggesting that the generation of conservatives who came of age in the Reagan years are ready to make their mark on the party.

When Cruz first jumped into the race for Senate, admirers immediately predicted an epic Tea Party against the GOP establishment battle like Rubio versus Charlie Crist in Florida or Paul versus Trey Grayson in Kentucky. But for a while, the conservative vote was splintered among several candidates (the most important competitor on the right was Michael Williams) and Lt. Gov. Donald Dewhurt seemed like a strong frontrunner.

Gradually, Cruz consolidated conservative support. He has the backing of FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, Redstate.com’s Erick Erickson, and the radio talk show host Mark Levin. George Will, the dean of Washington conservative columnists, opined that for “conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than” Cruz.

A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law (magna cum laude), Cruz displays legal interests quite uncharacteristic of the Ivy League: he believes it is important to limit the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments make clear. The former Texas solicitor general has tried to put these principles into action.

Cruz understands that fighting for limited government will sometimes entail fighting other Republicans. He has assailed Dewhurst’s proposal for a Texas wage tax on businesses as a thinly veiled personal income tax. He’s under no illusion that Americans are likely to elect 51 constitutionalist senators, but says a dozen or so working within the Republican caucus could do a world of good.

The ideological composition of the Senate Republican conference will be determined by primary races in states like Texas, Indiana, and Utah. But in some segments of the party, there has been movement away from the idea that individual mandates and deficit-funded government programs are only bad when instituted by Democrats.

Looking at the GOP presidential candidates and their surrogates, many conservatives undoubtedly feel such a changing of the guard couldn’t come too soon.

Originally Posted by Fox Business:

Originally Published by The Daily Caller:

Former Texas solicitor general and current Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz told The Daily Caller that he expects every member of Congress to step up the push for answers and accountability with regard to Operation Fast and Furious. Cruz also said that he thinks Attorney General Eric Holder should resign, that President Barack Obama should fire him or that the U.S. House of Representatives should move to impeach him.

“Fast and Furious is an outrage,” Cruz told The Daily Caller at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “I’ve spent much of my adult life in law enforcement. The idea that our federal law enforcement was knowingly and willingly selling guns to Mexican drug cartels and that those guns have been used to murder innocent civilians and murder a federal law enforcement officer, I mean, that is truly shocking. It is outrageous and no one has been held accountable. I’ve been speaking out on this a long time. People all over Texas and all over the country are outraged, and Eric Holder needs to resign. Whatever he knew, or didn’t know, ultimately, the buck stops with him in the Department of Justice and the idea that ours is running guns to Mexican drug cartels. You can’t make this stuff up. He needs to submit his resignation and if he doesn’t submit his resignation, President Obama needs to fire him because our U.S. Department of Justice cannot be providing guns to criminals.”

As of Monday, 103 members of the House have demanded Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation or firing over the scandal, signed an official resolution of “no confidence” in Holder, or both. Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma; all major Republican presidential candidates; and two sitting governors — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas — have demanded Holder’s resignation, too.

Cruz said the groundswell in Congress against Holder isn’t enough. He expects every member of Congress to step up and push for accountability.

“Every member of Congress should speak out,” Cruz told TheDC. “There needs to be accountability and there needs to be responsibility for this. If President Obama ignores those calls [for Holder’s resignation] — and sadly, we’ve seen a pattern from this president of disregarding the law, disregarding the Constitution and jamming his agenda down the throats of the American people — if President Obama continues to ignore those calls, the U.S. House of Representatives should initiate impeachment proceedings. The Constitution provides a mechanism for a cabinet member who is running his agency in a way that is harming the American people, that is within the authority, constitutionally, of the U.S. House of Representatives: If Eric Holder won’t submit his own resignation and President Obama won’t fire him, then the House of Representatives should impeach him.”

Cruz added that it appears Holder and other Justice Department officials responsible for Fast and Furious aren’t being held to the same standards any private citizens would be held to if they engaged in similar activity. “If you or I sold automatic weapons to a drug cartel, and those weapons were used to murder innocent citizens, you or I would go to prison,” Cruz told TheDC. “That’s the way that criminal laws work. We need to know what the attorney general knew and when he knew it. But, regardless of what he knew, this happened under his watch and he needs to resign because that’s the act of a responsible leader.”