37 Facts About Senator Ted Cruz

1. Senator Ted Cruz worked as a policy advisor in the George W Bush administration before serving as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008.

2. Senator Ted Cruz was reelected in a close Senate race in 2018 against Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke.

3. The competition for the Republican presidential nomination between Trump and Senator Ted Cruz was deeply acrimonious and characterized by a series of public personal attacks.

4. Rafael Edward Senator Ted Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Senator Ted Cruz.

5. Senator Ted Cruz's is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.

6. Senator Ted Cruz earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.

7. Junior high school, Senator Ted Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston.

8. At the firm, Senator Ted Cruz worked on matters relating to the National Rifle Association and helped prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton.

9. Senator Ted Cruz defended two record-setting $54-million personal injury awards in New Mexico at the appellate level, including one that a lower court had thrown out.

10. Senator Ted Cruz ran as a Tea Party candidate in the 2012 Republican primary, and The Washington Post called his victory "the biggest upset of 2012.

11. Senator Ted Cruz disclosed the loans on his Senate financial disclosure forms in July 2012, but not on the FEC form.

12. Senator Ted Cruz faced the Democratic nominee, US Representative Beto O'Rourke, in the general election.

13. Senator Ted Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act.

14. Senator Ted Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House Speaker John Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill.

15. In June 2016, Senator Ted Cruz blamed the Obama administration for the Orlando nightclub shooting, reasoning that it did not track the perpetrator Omar Mateen properly while he was on the terrorist watch-list.

16. On February 23, while speaking at the 2017 CPAC, Senator Ted Cruz showed interest in Trump's nomination of a young justice in the mold of Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

17. Senator Ted Cruz called fellow Republicans "squishes" on gun-control issues during a Tea Party rally.

18. When Boehner resigned from the House in September 2015, Senator Ted Cruz expressed his concern that before resigning Boehner might have "cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of its tenure".

19. Senator Ted Cruz is one of the Senate Republicans in favor of the "nuclear option", "to speed up consideration of President Trump's nominees".

20. Senator Ted Cruz appeared on Carlson's program the next night to apologize for that comment as "frankly dumb" and "sloppy.

21. Senator Ted Cruz said that the words "growth and opportunity" should be tattooed on the hands of every Republican politician.

22. Senator Ted Cruz raised nearly $92 million, a record for a Republican primary candidate, much of it from small online donors.

23. Senator Ted Cruz won his widest margin up to that point in Kansas, where he beat front-runner Donald Trump by 25 points.

24. Senator Ted Cruz placed second in Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii.

25. Several lawsuits and ballot challenges asserting that Senator Ted Cruz was ineligible to become US president were filed at the time.

26. In July 2018, Senator Ted Cruz spoke at the Rally for Religious Freedom in Asia.

27. Senator Ted Cruz opposes the legalization of marijuana, but believes it should be decided at the state level.

28. Senator Ted Cruz wants to decrease the size of the government significantly.

29. Senator Ted Cruz voted against the bill because it neglected "to reduce a substantial backlog of projects, to the detriment of projects with national implications, such as the Sabine–Neches Waterway".

30. In 2013, Senator Ted Cruz said that the US had no "dog in the fight" during the Syrian Civil War and that its armed forces should not serve as "al-Qaeda's air force".

31. In September 2016, Senator Ted Cruz backed the Obama administration's plan to sell more than $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

32. Co-sponsor of the resolution to commemorate the Armenian genocide, Senator Ted Cruz said that while Turkey is a NATO ally, "We should never be afraid to tell the truth, and alliances grounded in lies are themselves unsustainable.

33. Senator Ted Cruz co-signed a letter to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick that read, "As China amplifies its campaign of intimidation, you and your company must decide whether to look beyond the bottom line and promote American values—like freedom of speech and thought—or to give in to Beijing's demands in order to preserve market access.

34. In December 2020, Senator Ted Cruz blocked the Hong Kong People's Freedom and Choice Act, which would give Hong Kongers refugee status, citing the threat of spying by China.

35. In March 2016, about seven months before the forthcoming presidential election, Senator Ted Cruz argued the Senate should not consider Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court on the grounds that "this should be a decision for the people.

36. Senator Ted Cruz pinned some of his blame on then-President Obama, saying that Obama had overseen outsourcing for the previous seven years.

37. Senator Ted Cruz reaffirmed his position in 2022 after comments by Justice Clarence Thomas.