A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  Not in the Senate. Historically, each senator was given three days to choose whether to stay in his or her current office or move to another office. After the most senior senator chose, then the next most senior senator had three days to decide. And so on. One needn’t be my mathematician mother to figure out that, at that pace, it would take 300 days to allocate the Senate offices. Thankfully, the year I was elected, Chuck Schumer, who was the chairman of the Rules Committee, offered some good news. Now each senator had one day instead of three; thus the process had been condensed to merely 100 days.

  The whole time, there were a dozen Senate offices sitting empty, while the wheels of government slowly turned. Frankly, my suspicion always was that it was one part bureaucracy, one part inertia, and one very big part freshman hazing.

  More than once, Texans would come to visit their newly elected senator, see me and my staff sharing desks in the subterranean office, and say with a raised eyebrow, “Are you really a senator?”

  In my first month in office, President Obama made two important nominations to his foreign policy and national security team. Senator John Kerry, the former Democratic presidential nominee, was to be secretary of state, replacing Hillary Clinton, whose record left much to be desired, and Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, would be secretary of defense, replacing Clintonite Leon Panetta. (Panetta, as it turned out, would soon offer a scathing critique of the Obama administration, and the president personally.)

  Both Kerry and Hagel came by my basement office to visit with me in what are labeled “courtesy calls” to the senators voting on their nominations. For a man who had publicly labeled the tea party as a threat to our nation and would even demand that the media not give airtime to tea partiers’ “absurd notions,” John Kerry was surprisingly pleasant and gregarious. This was another D.C. staple—regardless of the scathing things said in public, we are privately all supposed to be buddy-buddy.

  And yet he was oddly tone-deaf. His first request was to ask me for my help ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty—a request that almost caused me to laugh out loud because of my decades-long opposition to treaties that undermine U.S. sovereignty and subject us to the extralegal authority of foreign bodies. It would have been like my asking him to support the full-scale repeal of Obamacare. For a man who prided himself on his foreign policy expertise and who was seeking to be America’s chief diplomat, it was puzzling that he wouldn’t have understood that a conservative would have serious qualms about the treaty.

  Though Kerry was personable, even charming, that was not sufficient reason to support a nominee for America’s top diplomatic post—especially one who for nearly four decades had managed to find himself on the wrong side of virtually every foreign policy issue. In fact he was wrong with such stunning regularity that one could almost ask his position and immediately know that the sound position was precisely the opposite. He supported the Sandinistas imposing communist rule in Nicaragua, and vigorously opposed President Reagan’s successful efforts to stand up to the Soviet Union—efforts that ultimately won the Cold War. He opposed the Persian Gulf War, fought during the George H. W. Bush administration, which saved Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. He saw the terrorist-supporting Yasser Arafat as a partner in peace. He was sure the 2007 surge in U.S. troops in Iraq—which rescued that nation from an Al Qaeda assault—was a hopeless strategy. And he lobbied hard to build a new alliance with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Most of my Senate colleagues didn’t seem too concerned about any of that; it was clear from the outset he was going to be confirmed resoundingly. In part this was out of genuine affection for Kerry, a Senate institution. But there was a cynical reason as well—once Kerry resigned his seat, at least a few Republicans believed that Republican Scott Brown would be elected to replace him.

  As a general principle, presidents ought to have wide latitude in choosing the men and women who serve in their administration. It was notable that John Kerry, however, did not share that view. During the George W. Bush administration, he had voted against the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general; against the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general; and against the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. Likewise I did not vote to confirm a secretary of state whose views I believed were harmful to the national security interests of the United States. On that vote, I found myself joined in opposition by only two other senators: John Cornyn, my colleague from Texas, and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

  When I went to the well of the Senate to record my vote before the clerk, it drew gasps. At least that’s how it felt. It was viewed as somehow impertinent for a freshman senator to dare vote no for such a nomination, especially against an icon of the institution and especially after nearly every other Republican in the Senate, moderate or conservative, had indicated the proper vote I was supposed to make. This was an early sign of many senators’ view—that freshmen are supposed to meekly go along with prevailing sentiments. It was markedly different from my view of the office, which is that I had a responsibility to 26 million Texans to do my very best to represent them and to stand for the principles they sent me to Washington to defend.

  At roughly the same time, aspiring secretary of defense Chuck Hagel’s confirmation process came to a head. When I began to examine the former senator from Nebraska’s record, I was astonished. John Kerry’s record has been consistently liberal and wrongheaded, and yet Chuck Hagel’s record as a senator was markedly to the left of Kerry’s when it came to national security. As one of only two senators who opposed renewal of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act in 2001, Hagel refused to stand up to nations like Iran, whose nuclear ambitions pose grave national security threats to America. And he had repeatedly suggested a moral equivalence between the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, who murder innocent women and children, and the Israel Defense Forces, which defend our democratic ally against terrorists seeking to destroy the innocent.

  But Hagel was another nominee we were supposed to back reflexively—even though it was pretty obvious that many of my colleagues who had served with him, especially Republicans, didn’t like him and questioned his temperament. I didn’t know him personally, but his record was troubling.

  At his hearing before the Armed Services Committee, I took the occasion to vigorously question Hagel. Among my questions were inquiries about a video I played of Hagel’s asserting that Israel had committed war crimes. He had no good response. All in all, it was a rough outing in front of his former colleagues—and not just because of me. At one point, in response to friendly questioning from Democrats, he mistakenly said the Obama administration’s policy was to “contain” an Iranian nuclear arsenal, rather than to prevent Iran from developing one in the first place. Later, he had to be corrected by the Democratic chairman of the committee—on a matter that should be one of, if not the, principal concern of the secretary of defense. The consensus, even among his supporters, was that he was ill-prepared for serious questions.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee requires nominees for senior positions to submit a disclosure of the income they have received in the last two years. Hagel did so; however, there was a three-year gap between when he had left the Senate and filed annual financial disclosures and when he was nominated to be secretary of defense. Additionally, he had disclosed several substantial payments from financial services firms without identifying the ultimate source of the funds.

  Accordingly, I wrote Hagel a letter, asking him to provide more details. Specifically, I asked him to disclose all the income he had received in the last five years, and also to disclose whether any of the payments from financial services firms came directly or indirectly from foreign nations, corporations, or individuals. I circulated that letter at our Senate Republican lunch, and twenty-five other Republican senators joined me, including Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham.

  These questions were not unprecedented. When Henry Kissinger was named by President George W. Bush to be on the 9/11 Commission, Democrats de
manded that he provide a similar disclosure. Kissinger refused, and he withdrew from the committee. Likewise, when Hillary Clinton was nominated to be secretary of state, she voluntarily provided seven years’ worth of disclosures.

  Hagel’s response was astonishing. He didn’t follow the Kissinger model of refusing to answer and withdrawing. Nor did he follow the Clinton model of voluntarily handing over the information. Instead he simply refused to answer. In effect, he told the members of the Armed Services Committee to go jump in a lake. And yet he still expected to be confirmed.

  My letter had identified seven payments from financial services firms. For six of them, he stated that the source of the funds had not been foreign, without providing details. But for the seventh, a payment of $200,000, he would not offer any such assurance.

  When Hagel’s nomination came up for a vote in committee, I voted no. I focused on his extreme foreign policy record and also his refusal to answer reasonable financial disclosure questions from twenty-six senators. I noted that his written answer regarding the $200,000 payment—that he could not tell us if it came from a foreign source—raised the obvious implication that it may well have. The answer was important. If, for example, the payment had come from the government of Canada, say for being involved in a dispute over Canadian lumber, nobody would find that troubling for a defense secretary. But, on the other hand, payment from other nations would be highly troubling. Therefore, I observed, “it is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.”

  In hindsight, I made a mistake when I uttered the words “North Korea.”

  North Korea was on my mind because earlier that day, its government had announced that it was targeting nuclear missiles at three U.S. cities, including Austin, my former home. But the problem with my mentioning North Korea was that there was no credible reason anyone would believe Hagel had received funds from North Korea. His most questionable policy statements had all concerned Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Middle East—not North Korea. There was no natural nexus or connection.

  In uttering those two words, I allowed the White House and the Democrats to change the subject. Immediately I was accused of a “new McCarthyism” by somehow asserting that Hagel had received money from North Korea—an assertion I did not actually make. This is one of the political games played in Washington—to engage in distractions, using smoke and mirrors as needed.

  There is an old saying by trial lawyers: If you have the law, pound the law; if you have the facts, pound the facts; and if you don’t have either, pound the table. In the game of distraction, the White House, Harry Reid, and the Democrats very ably changed the subject from Hagel’s disastrous foreign policy record and his refusal to provide reasonable financial disclosure to the specter of a Texas Republican as the second coming of Joe McCarthy.

  No Democrat was willing to defend Chuck Hagel’s foreign policy on the merits. Indeed, one of the sorriest aspects of his confirmation was that, despite his repeated history of antagonism to the nation of Israel, not a single Democrat—every one of whom professes to be a strong advocate of our friendship and alliance with Israel—even asked him any serious questions about his extreme record in that regard. Instead senator after senator on the left simply invoked the McCarthy image, trying to end the debate.

  Of course, the term McCarthyism refers to people making charges for which there is no reasonable basis in fact. In my instance, I was asking for the same financial disclosures that had been asked of Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton. And Hagel’s own written answers had explicitly raised the inference that he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars from a foreign government. Given his written admission, any responsible senator would insist on knowing the answer.

  We had 45 Republicans, and if 41 of us stood together, we could stop the Senate from proceeding on Hagel’s nomination. I worked closely with Mitch, whipping our colleagues to insist on the disclosure. And, initially, we won. Forty Republicans voted against proceeding to the nomination, a remarkable and unprecedented vote against a defense secretary nominee.

  But, alas, we could not hold. In the two weeks that followed, the personal attacks intensified. Democrats could not understand how a freshman senator, just weeks into his term, could possibly be leading (and winning) this fight. Ratcheting up the heat, Senator Barbara Boxer of California took to the Senate floor to charge that I had a “list” of names in my pocket, just like McCarthy had. Media outlets lapped it up. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews put ominous pictures of me next to McCarthy, growling that we were both “black Irish.”

  None of the reporters covering the story could be bothered with addressing the substance. Repeatedly, I urged reporters, “for every ten stories you write repeating the personal attacks against me, could you maybe write one on substance? Namely that the nominee (1) absolutely refuses to disclose any of his income for three years, (2) has a long and extreme record of antagonism towards Israel and openness towards Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons, and (3) has admitted in writing that he may have received $200,000 in cash from a foreign government.” Actual “news” reporters would want to know, at a minimum, whether our soon-to-be defense secretary had been paid directly by a foreign government. But no such news reporters could be found.

  With the media’s complicity, the Democrats’ political ploy eventually worked. Some two weeks after 40 of 98 voting senators had successfully blocked cloture, the Senate held another vote, and this time cloture was invoked, with only 27 Republicans voting against it. Thirteen of them had flipped sides (including several who had signed the letter with me just a couple of weeks earlier).

  Later that day, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm a secretary of defense who had a record of undermining our ally Israel, rationalizing the terrorism of Hezbollah and Hamas, expressing openness to allowing Iran to build a nuclear weapon, and affirmatively withholding information about whether he had received funding from foreign governments hostile to the United States. It was not a proud day for the Senate.

  The media’s personal attacks on me were a sign of things to come. For a long time, the left has had two caricatures of conservatives: that we are either stupid or evil. I take it as a backhanded compliment that they have, to some extent, invented a third category for me: “crazy.”

  Conservatives spend a lot of time complaining about the press, and it’s not always productive. Yes, almost all journalists are Democrats. Yes, reporters have a double standard when it comes to conservatives. But the public is smarter than many elites assume, and time and again, the people see right through the media’s bias.

  There is, however, a new, particularly noxious species of yellow journalism that is beginning to infect what passes for modern political discourse. It’s called “PolitiFact.” Through this website, left-wing editorial writers frequently dress up their liberal views as “facts” and conclude that anyone who does not agree with their view of the world is objectively lying. Then, left-wing hacks immediately run out and say, “Look! This conservative said something that PolitiFact calls a lie. He wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him with a two-by-four!”

  The first problem with websites like PolitiFact is their heavy selection bias. They pick and choose what to check and what not to check. For example, in the course of a thirty-minute commencement address at Hillsdale College, I mentioned that Americans had invented Pong, Space Invaders, and the iPhone. PolitiFact decided to fact-check that statement, and it turns out part of it was indeed mistaken: Space Invaders was actually invented in Japan, not the United States.1 When they pointed it out, I quickly acknowledged my inadvertent error, noting that “it sure seemed American when I played it as a young boy.” Because they picked that single sentence, they concluded what I said was “mostly false.” Had they picked the paragraph, or the page, or the whole speech, they would have instead rated it “mostly true” (other than a minor error concerning Space Invaders). The rating was entirely a
function of the initial selection.

  A second, bigger problem is that PolitiFact often labels statements by conservatives “false” because the statements criticize liberals. I recall that PolitiFact labeled as a “pants on fire” lie my statement that President Obama began his presidential administration by going on a worldwide apology tour. In fact, Obama traveled around Europe saying the United States “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” It’s true that he didn’t explicitly add the words “And I’m sorry.” But his message wasn’t lost on anybody. And unless it is your job to protect the Democratic president and to find fault with statements by conservatives, it’s pretty obvious that Obama wasn’t exactly bragging about what he called American “arrogance.” He was bemoaning it and vowing to do better. In other words, he was issuing an apology.

  The third, and biggest, problem is that they regularly define left-wing opinion as an objective “fact.” Anyone who disagrees with left-wing opinion is therefore a liar. So, behind a robe of objectiveness and truth-telling, they labeled as “false” my oft-repeated statement that “the greatest lie in politics is that the Republicans are the party of the rich.” In the world of PolitiFact, it is objectively “true” that Republicans are the party of the rich, even though it is the most vulnerable among us—not billionaires in private jets—who are suffering the most under President Obama’s failed economic policies. And it is objectively “true” even though many of the wealthiest donors to political campaigns (the George Soroses and Tom Steyers, not to mention the limousine liberals in Hollywood and Manhattan) donate massively to the Democrats, not to the so-called party of the rich. Their liberal opinions are “facts,” and anyone who dares disagree is deemed a “liar.”