by Ted Cruz
• “We’ve had enough talk—disruptive talk—in America of left and right, dividing us down the center. There is really no such choice facing us. The only choice we have is up or down—up, to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down, to the deadly dullness of totalitarianism.”
• “Do we still have the courage and the capacity to dream? If so, I wish you’d join me in a dream. Join me in a dream of a California whose government isn’t characterized by political hacks and cronies and relatives—an administration that doesn’t make its decisions based on political expediency but on moral truth. Together, let us find men to match our mountains. We can have a government administered by men and women who are appointed on the basis of ability and dedication—not as a reward for political favors.”
Slowly his efforts gave rise to a grassroots movement across the state. The Reagan registration campaign encouraged supporters to register six new voters each. The goal was a million new registrations, which as it happened was the exact margin of Reagan’s landslide over Brown—in what one biographer later called a “stunning, out-of-nowhere victory.” A large number of Democratic voters crossed over for this so-called right-wing extremist, including nearly one-third of labor union members. It was the beginning of a force that would transform political history: Reagan Democrats.
Pat Brown was shell-shocked by the result. A man once touted as a potential presidential contender lost in a landslide he never contemplated. But Reagan had seen it coming. Brown, Reagan recalled, was like many politicians who had become part of the establishment. He had “a kind of arrogance that takes place when an administration grows old and tired in government—an arrogance that makes someone have a contempt for the intelligence of the people. And I don’t think he’s been able to hide that.” The Reagan Revolution had begun.
As my career back in Texas began to take root, Heidi and I faced a decision that confronts many families with two professional careers. For nearly two years, we had commuted cross-country, flying back-and-forth every weekend, but that was hard on a young marriage; so we decided together that our next chapter would be fully in Texas. But leaving D.C. wasn’t easy for Heidi. She was flourishing in the Bush administration; she loved her job at the National Security Council, which enabled her to focus on many of the issues in the developing world that had so inspired her when her parents were missionaries in Africa. Heidi had always planned to combine a career in public service with substantial years in business. And this was a good time after Bush’s first term for her to return to the private sector. But Heidi wasn’t a native Texan, and it was initially hard for her to move to a new state, away from so many people she loved. The adjustment led to her facing a period of depression, which was really difficult for us both. I did my best to help Heidi through this time, we prayed together and she went to counseling and relied on the love and support of her family and close friends. In the end, it was a period that strengthened our marriage and was an important spiritual turning point for us both. God can use people who want to serve Him, regardless of location or circumstance, if we are open to His plan. Some months later, a friend invited Heidi to a Christian retreat—called the Road to Emmaus, named after the road described in Ephesians where Jesus appeared to the disciples after he had been crucified. He walked there with them and they did not even know it was Him for an extended period. That retreat helped Heidi turn the page and embrace our next chapter.
Like the hard charger she is, she built a thriving business with Goldman Sachs in Texas. Now Goldman is often a target for political criticism, and when they or any other big banks are coming to Washington seeking special favors, they deserve the criticism. But Heidi’s job had nothing to do with Washington; instead, she was working with Texas families and foundations, helping them invest and save for the future. And she was really good at it; her clients trusted her. If you’re handing over your life savings to someone to invest, what matters most is that you can trust them to look out for you. Heidi earned her clients’ confidence, because she’s the most trustworthy person I know. She also came to love the state as much as I did.
Within a few years, we started a family.
On April 14, 2008, Heidi and I welcomed our first child into the world. A precious—and now precocious—baby girl, Caroline Camille Cruz captured my heart from the first moment I saw her. She shows no sign of letting it go. As she lay in the hospital bed, in labor, Heidi was typing furiously on her Blackberry, still tending to the needs of her clients. I admired her tenacious work ethic—it’s one of the many qualities that made me fall in love with her—but this was too much. I gently pulled the Blackberry out of her hands. “It will be here later,” I said. She had more important things to do.
To be fair, when it came to leaving work at the hospital steps, I wasn’t completely innocent. During much of the time we were there, I was studying cases for an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court scheduled for two days later. I was appearing in support of a Louisiana law that allowed capital punishment for the very worst child rapists. It was a horrible case, where a three-hundred-pound man had brutalized his seven-year-old stepdaughter. So just hours after Caroline was born, I said a prayer of thanksgiving, kissed my beautiful wife and baby daughter, rushed to the airport, and flew to Washington to argue the case.
As with many young families, the birth of our first child led us to reexamine our financial circumstances and our long-term career goals. Heidi knew that I envisioned a future in public service, and this seemed like an opportune time to try to establish some financial security. I decided that it was time for me to move on from the solicitor general’s office to return to the private sector.
I interviewed with a number of Texas firms and ended up joining the Houston office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius, a large international firm formed in Philadelphia in 1873. Today the firm has nearly two thousand lawyers and well over $1 billion in annual revenue; it is one of the largest law firms in the world. Morgan Lewis had historically been an apolitical firm, though one of my future partners was Fred Fielding, who had the distinction of serving as White House counsel for two presidents—Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.*
I joined the firm as a partner and was given the responsibility of leading its U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate practice.
When I interviewed with various law firms, I was candid about my intention to run for elected office in Texas. The dissatisfaction of the American people with both political parties was increasingly clear in the later years of the Bush administration—a dissatisfaction that grew more acute with the financial collapse of 2008 and Washington’s bailout of major Wall Street banks. As much as I respected President Bush, the bailouts were just wrong.
The Bush administration came to office promising to revitalize the Reagan Revolution—which had inspired me to get into politics in the first place. Instead, it took the Republican Party down the path of bigger government, excessive spending, and new entitlement programs that we couldn’t afford.
By 2008, many of us were disenchanted. A Republican president should not add $5 trillion to the national debt. There was the controversy over the selection of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court; the seemingly ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina; supporting the legendary “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska, which became an emblem of Washington waste; and an immigration plan that appeared to promise amnesty to illegal immigrants while failing to solve the fundamental problem. All of these things ran contrary to the kind of administration the Bush team had promised eight years earlier.
I could support Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” because I believed it reflected my belief that conservative policies are those that best help the aspirational goals of every American. Conservative policies—what I call “opportunity conservatism”—empower small businesses, encourage job creation, and help people lift themselves from poverty. I did not think that compassionate conservatism should become an excuse for government to intrude more and more into our ev
eryday lives.
As the Bush administration drew to a close and the 2008 campaign was in full swing, it was not the moment for me to go into politics. But my partners at Morgan Lewis had no objection to my planning to do so in the future; in the meantime, I was charged with building a top-flight appellate litigation team that could endure at the firm even if I did get elected to office. I set about that task at once.
As solicitor general, I already had experience managing the appeals for more than seven hundred attorneys. Morgan Lewis had a tremendous global practice, representing over half of the Fortune 100 companies, but it had not historically had a strong Supreme Court practice, which is a hallmark of most top-tier firms. My job was to change that.
I began by recruiting some of the best talent I could find, bringing in skilled appellate litigators who had clerked for Justice O’Connor, Justice Scalia, and Chief Justice Rehnquist. And then we set out building the business, pitching new clients and growing the practice. Our focus was on “bet the company” cases, representing major corporations in cases that few observers thought were winnable.
I represented FedEx before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, winning a major victory and overturning an adverse decision from the National Labor Relations Board. Other significant victories included successfully representing Kimberly-Clark, Dentsply, and AstraZeneca in high-stakes commercial litigation.
I also represented a French housewares company, SEB, in multimillion-dollar patent litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court against a Chinese company that had stolen their intellectual property (a patented deep fryer), reverse-engineered it, and sold thousands illegally in the United States. Arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in the middle of a campaign for Senate was not easy—the time it took for me to prepare drove my campaign team nuts—but the results were worth it. When the Court took the appeal, the widespread assessment from observers was that SEB was likely to lose, and yet we ended up winning the case 8–1.
Two of the most significant cases I litigated were both pro bono, which meant the firm and I handled them for free. I was deeply honored to represent more than three million veterans defending the constitutionality of the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial, a lone white Latin cross that had been erected over seventy years earlier to honor our soldiers who gave their lives in World War I. The American Civil Liberties Union had sued, and they had won—the district court and the court of appeals had both ordered that this long-standing veterans memorial be torn down, because they believed the image of a cross could not be allowed on federal land. On appeal, I represented the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and several other veterans organizations before the U.S. Supreme Court, and we won 5–4.
That victory was yet another opportunity to defend religious liberty, a deep passion of mine, and, today that monument to our brave soldiers still stands.
I also was proud to represent John Thompson, a Louisiana man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Two of my partners had represented Thompson pro bono for decades, and they had uncovered DNA evidence that proved his innocence. Tragically, the Louisiana district attorney’s office had deliberately suppressed the DNA evidence, and Thompson spent eighteen years of his life imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. He was released, and he subsequently sued the DA’s office for their wrongful conduct. A jury awarded him $14 million, and I helped represent Thompson on appeal.
Some caricatures suggest that a conservative would be reluctant to represent a convicted murderer. That may be true, if the client is clearly guilty. Although every defendant deserves a lawyer, I’ve handled too many horrible criminal cases to have any interest in representing violent criminals. But John Thompson was innocent. And critical to supporting the death penalty is ensuring that we vigorously protect the innocent. DNA has enabled many guilty persons to be convicted, and it has proven the innocence of many others.
Before the court of appeals, we won with an equally divided court, 8–8. One of my partners then ably argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and, unfortunately, we lost, 5–4. Thompson deserved restitution for the injustice that was done to him, and it saddened me to see him denied. But, I must say, it was inspirational to spend some time with Thompson, to see the grace and peace he manifested despite having nearly two decades of his life stolen from him; upon release, he started a nonprofit to help others exonerated from wrongful convictions.
Each of these cases in private practice had a significant impact. And, over five years at Morgan Lewis, our appellate practice grew to more than thirty attorneys nationwide, became a significant revenue generator for the firm, and racked up a remarkable record of wins, so much so that the National Law Journal in 2010 included Morgan Lewis for the first time on its “Appellate Hot List,” their ranking of the top twenty law firms “that represent the best in the practice of appellate law.”
In 2009, Texas politicos were undergoing their unique version of musical chairs. U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had stated that she intended to resign her Senate seat and run for governor against the Republican incumbent, Rick Perry. David Dewhurst, the lieutenant governor, in turn planned to run for Hutchison’s open Senate seat, which left Attorney General Greg Abbott free to run for Dewhurst’s seat as lieutenant governor. I decided to campaign for attorney general, to replace my former boss, and I declared my candidacy for the post in January 2009.
At the time, there were four serious Republicans looking at the attorney general’s race, five if you included myself as a serious candidate—which most Texas observers did not. I could understand why. I had never been elected to any political office. I’d never even run a campaign. I had zero statewide name recognition. Indeed, as I often joked, the last elected office I had held was on student council.
My likely opponents included two state supreme court justices (both already elected statewide), a member of Congress personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a state representative who represented and was beloved by the biggest donors in Dallas.
If I had any hope of winning, we had to do something that had never been done before—build a massive grassroots army to overcome the money and vested interests across the state.
My first task was assembling a team. The very first person who joined me was my political consultant, a young man named Jason Johnson. Jason had some of the characteristics of a Republican James Carville—though I doubt either one would appreciate the comparison.
Jason came from modest circumstances in rural East Texas. When I made reference to the fact that he’d grown up in a double-wide trailer, he feigned offense—because his trailer wasn’t double-wide. Those, he said, belonged to the rich people in town.
I first met Jason when he was Greg Abbott’s top political strategist. At the time, he had run nearly 70 campaigns in Texas and had won all but two of them. He has a deep, analytical sense for politics and an instinctive sense about people—two priceless qualities in a political strategist. The New York Times once described him as “a scrappy East Texan” with “a touch of mad genius.” That led me to give him the nickname “Touch of Genius.”
Having forged a well-deserved reputation as a top political consultant, Jason could have worked for any of the candidates considering the race. Indeed, conventional wisdom was that the right thing for him to do was to sign on with one of the candidates with unlimited financial resources, who could compensate him richly for his services. Jason decided to come with me instead. We knew each other well, and he cared a good deal that the next attorney general, like Greg Abbott, would be a principled conservative who would stand and fight for the causes we believed in. My hiring of Jason was the first signal to Texas politicos that I was serious about the race.
My second hire was John Drogin, a former reporter at the Vatican who had served as press secretary for the then-junior senator from Texas, John Cornyn, and thus knew many reporters in the state well. Drogin and I were introduced through mutual friends and met at a coffee sh
op where we spent several hours getting to know each other. I liked him immediately—so much in fact that at the end of our interview, I extended an offer to him to become my campaign manager.
His response revealed a lot about his character, and convinced me I had made the right choice. Drogin, who at the time was jobless, didn’t just jump at any offer to manage a statewide campaign. Instead he said, “I need to ask you two questions before I can accept.”
The first question was “Are you a Christian?” The second was “Are you pro-life?”
He had had his heart broken before by politicians who said one thing and then did another once elected. “I want to look you in the eyes when you answer both of these questions,” he said. The earnestness with which he said this was endearing, and thankfully I was able to answer both questions in the affirmative.
With Johnson and Drogin on board, we built a small, incredibly lean campaign of young people committed to real change and to working harder than anybody else. That’s how you build a grassroots campaign—with commitment and shoe leather. Over the next year, we attended hundreds of small events across the state of Texas. I sat with people, listened to them, and shared my beliefs and vision. So many of the Texans I encountered, from both parties, had grown tired of career politicians who said what voters wanted to hear, promised them the moon, and then disappointed them, because the politicians weren’t truly committed to real change. I was determined to show them that I was not one of those people.
The momentum we built was slow but steady. With each person to come on board our campaign, it became easier to recruit the next person and the next. And we did on occasion receive boosts from unexpected corners.