Ted Cruz will never be President of the United States of America

Astute Reader(s)™ of this blog undoubtedly noticed that we went over a year without posting anything. One of my regrets about that period is that I had a draft post about how Ted Cruz will never be elected President of the United States.  There are many reasons for why Senator Cruz will never be elected, I will address two.

First, Senator Cruz clearly has terrible judgment.  For example, Senator Cruz thinks that Captain Kirk is a Republican. As noted in the linked article, putting a political party label on a 23^rd century interstellar character is silly. 

Second, Senator Cruz seems willing to literally say or do anything in order to win an election. Florida Senator Marco Rubio pointed that out when both he and Senator Cruz were running for the GOP presidential nomination. On a related note, Senator Cruz seems willing to ingratiate himself to President Trump in such a servile way that one wonders if Senator Cruz is fan of self-denigration.  Senator Cruz recently tweeted a picture of his two school-age daughters standing next to President Trump. The occasion for the picture was that Senator Cruz and his family had dinner with President Trump and his wife.

Now if the only issue was the bad judgment of having two young girls pose for a picture next to a guy whose idea or romance is to “grab [women] by the pussy,” then this would be another example of the first point. But remember that President Trump called Senator Cruz a religious hypocrite and liar who “brings the Bible, holds it high, puts it down, lies.”  President Trump all threatened to “spill the beans” on Senator Cruz’s wife and then pointed out that Mrs. Cruz might be considered less attractive than President Trump’s wife. President Trump also suggested that Ted Cruz’s father might have had a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I could point out other occasions where the President attacked Senator Cruz, but I think you get the point. I do not think many people would set aside these attacks and have dinner with their attacker. Maybe Senator Cruz just wants to model forgiving behavior for his daughters, but I doubt it.

But the biggest reason that Senator Cruz will not be president is that he says things about the Supreme Court that he, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard law school who clerked for a Supreme Court justice and argued cases before the Supreme Court, cannot possibly believe.  For example, after the Supreme Court issued decisions Senator Cruz disagreed with about the Affordable Care Act and Same-Sex Marriage, Senator Cruz wrote that the United States Constitution should be amended to provide that Supreme Court justices face retention elections every eight years and that the justice would need to win not only a majority of the vote, but also win that majority in a majority of states. We have previously written about why retention elections are a bad idea. But this idea was even worse because it was clearly designed to make sure that only justices with support in states that vote solidly Republican would win retention. 

In any event, Senator Cruz is on my mind today because Beto O’Rourke, a congressional representative for Texas’s 16^th seat in the United States House of Representatives, has declared that he is running against Senator Cruz in Senator Cruz’s reelection bid. As the linked article points out, Congressperson O’Rourke was a guitar player and vocalist in the punk band Foss. You can see Foss playing one of their songs here. I don’t know if Senator Cruz was a fan of Foss. But it is possible he was, because Senator Cruz didn’t stop listening to rock music until September 11, 2001, when he became a fan of country music. A cynic might suggest that Senator Cruz's decision to link his new-found fandom of country music (which is very popular in Senator Cruz's state) to the date on which the United States suffered a terrible terrorist attack goes back to my second point.