Ted Cruz's "A Time for Truth"

I feel like I need to write a million disclaimers before I write this post, because the mere fact that I am writing it is blowing my mind…. so here are the disclaimers:

1) I see Vendetta’s point about reading autobiographies and how the authors are putting their best foot forward and giving a heavily biased recount of their story… so, everything I will be discussing in this post will have to get fact checked later on and then maybe I ll write another post about how wrong I was on this one.

2) I am not becoming a republican, much less a tea party member… I absolutely disagree with everything they stand for and at the end of the day, it Is a matter of moral values, which apparently are very divergent (they are about the bottom line ($$) I think people come first)

So, here it is…. deep breath…based on what I have read so far (half way done) I have gained a little bit of respect for Ted Cruz (pause, deep breath, look around….the world did not end my me writing that statement..phew!)

Okay….so, lets start by the beginning. The book starts with his view of what happened last year while they were discussing (once again) the debt ceiling and defaulting on government debt. So, what happened (according to Ted) is that in order to raise the ceiling 60 votes were needed in the senate. The democrats had 55 senators and republicans 45, so basically in order for the debt ceiling to be increased, 5 republicans needed to agree…. The problem here is that neither of the republicans wanted to default on the debt, but they also did not want to vote for the debt ceiling increase, so they found themselves in a sticky position…basically, if they all voted no, then there would be turmoil as we would be once gain downgraded by S&P, and then they would be to blame and blah blah blah, but also, they all had made campaign promises to cut spending, and increasing their debt ceiling would not make them very popular amongst their supporters…so, they found a creative way out… Basically, voting rules can be changed as long as votes are unanimous so they decided to suggest that only 50 votes were needed for the debt ceiling to be raised…And given that democrats had 55 senators, then that would guarantee that the debt ceiling would be raised without any republicans having to vote in favor of that… that way they would avoid an economic catastrophe without pissisng off their voters.  So, according to Ted, he disagreed with this… he pledged to do everything he could to stop government spending and decreasing the number of votes needed would not do so…so, for starters, I think it is a respectable position.  Personally, I think that the best thing to do would have been to vote for the ceiling to be increased, and explain to voters the consequences of not doing so and how basically his hands were tied..Ultimately, doing so would have shown bipartisanship and would have potentially made him a few friends across the aisle, but overall, I think his approach is a bit more respectable than the tricky maneuver of just decreasing the voting number. Once again, I need to go back and read about this from somebody else’s perspective, but based on what he wrote, this are my thoughts (if anyone reading this has suggested reading material regarding this issue, I’d be eternally grateful).

He talks about the debt and how it went from 10 to 16 or 18 trillion during the Obama admin, but he seems to ignore, or fails to remember that a lot of that spending comes from a war that he did not wage and bailing out an economy he did not break.

There are a few other anecdotes in which I seem to at least see where he is coming from. He mentions that when he worked as a clerk for Rehnquist, he learned that a lot of the republican Supreme Court justices appointed at least one democrat as their clerk, while democrats never appointed republicans as their clerks. Regarding this, he says that it shows that republicans are more open minded, which I sort of agree with, however, I do want to fact check this and also know how did they treat their liberal clerks and did they take them seriously or did they just accept them as a political move to see more fair and unbiased?

He talks about Gerrymandering in Texas and how at some point districts were distributed in a way that the majority of representative were democrats while the majority of the votes were republicans, which I agree is a little bit weird, but once again, I’d like to fact check this.

He talks about the 2000 election when Bush won his first term and there was the issue of the recount of the votes in Florida and how every county in Florida was counting differently (some were counting the hanging chads, some were not), and I agree that it should have been uniform, however, in general, when there were so many deficiencies in the voting system, should they have made a re-vote (instead of recount) in general?

There is the issue with suits to remove the pledge of allegiance and religious figures from public offices and schools… which, I agree with…But also find to be a waste of time and resources. He does what other republicans do and is to invoke the spirituality of the founding fathers and the Christian values on which this country is based… The problem that I find with this is that times have changed. When you invoke the founding father you have to put them in the context of what they would do today. Back then, they lived in a relatively homogeneous population in terms of race and religion, but there is so much more diversity these days. I’d personally like to think they would be more than tolerant towards other religions (or lack of), but there really is no way of knowing… so, let’s go back to the fact that separating religion from government is a good idea and try to implement that to modern times. I am not saying all religious figures should be removed (that would probably cost a lot of money). I am not very religious, but I think they have become part of this countries traditions (more than religion itself, just like Christmas), but from now on we need to be more inclusive (or rather, exclusive) for instance, no public funds should be used for the depiction of religious figures, and privately funded depictions can be displayed in public places, as long as it is not limited to certain denominations, so if people are willing to privately pay for a nativity scene to be displayed at a pubic park, that same park should also be available for display of a Menorah if someone privately wants to fund for it to be displayed.

Finally (for now), there is the issue of the Vienna convention and how it infringes in state sovereignty. Basically, he describes the case of one Mexican national that kills and rapes two girls and gets the death penalty. Years later, the UN says that when the guy was arrested he was not told that he could contact the consulate of Mexico, which is against the Vienna convention, which the US ratified, and therefore his conviction was not legal (I see it as the equivalent of forgetting to read Miranda rights). He says that the treaty should not be used in state cases and it interferes with the states sovereignty. I disagree. The treaty was signed by the US, so the entire country entered into an agreement; therefore it needs to be upheld. You can’t pick and choose to respect a treaty so it either becomes legal or not…and if it is not legal, then other countries don’t have to give American prisoners the right to contact a consulate when they get arrested abroad.

So, that is it for now. I know…. it may be a little shallow and show how little I actually know about politics…I need to read a bit more, but, overall the take home to this is that, while I don’t agree with Ted Cruz, he at least comes off (in his book) as someone who stands by his beliefs (regardless of how wrong those beliefs are). Basically, at least with him, what you see is what you get unlike other politicians who will flip flop or use trickery to their convenience (obviously, I don’t think he doesn’t do it, but at least that is the way he comes off in the book). I promise I’ll do some fact checking and come back and discuss all of these based on what I learn.

Update: Good God, I swear..it is like they use the first half of the book to tell their warm and fuzzy story, and just when you are thinking "oh, this guy is not that bad" the claws come out... still haven't finished, so I ll write a new post about it later...but just needed to let me reader (yes, I think I only have 1) that I have come back to my senses!