Must Read on Ted Cruz

If you've been following the egotistical career of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, you'll find these two articles very informative.

Here is a sample from GQ:

...Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation's capital. That alone isn't so outrageous for the Senate. "Every one of these guys thinks he's the smartest guy in the room," one senior Democratic aide told me. "But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He's just so brazen."

Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel's confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America's enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn't come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia's? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz's line of inquiry "out of bounds." 

And then there was the moment, just a month later, when the Judiciary Committee was debating the assault--weapons ban: Cruz was trying to get it through Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein's thick skull that there was this thing called the Second Amendment and that it deserved the same respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights. He made his point by rattling off other amendments and the rights they protected until Feinstein bristled, "I'm not a sixth grader. I've been on this committee for twenty years.... I've studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture."

Read the entire article, especially those of you that are alumni of those fine universities that Cruz referred to as 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown' (see GQ).

Mother Jones also ran and article about Cruz, and one section detailed his experience in front of the Supreme Court. Here is a brief snippet from Mother Jones:

...Most of the cases Cruz argued before the Supreme Court shared a common theme—Texas' constitutional right to do as it pleases, free from Washington's meddling.

Of Cruz's eight oral arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of Texas, five involved the death penalty, with Cruz arguing, at various points, that Texas should be allowed to execute the mentally ill, a Mexican national who hadn't been informed of his Vienna Convention right to speak to his consulate, and a man who raped his stepdaughter.....

There is another case Ted Cruz was involved in that will shock many people. The NY Times has the info:

....Mr. Cruz rarely mentions his earliest appearances before the Supreme Court, which do not make for great campaign material. During his first trip there, in 2003, he argued that Texas was free to back out of a legal settlement in which it had vowed to improve health care services for poor children. The justices ruled unanimously against Texas.... 

What kind of a cold-hearted person would argue against health services for poor kids? Ted Cruz.