A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  Another bias in the media is how its members wield the attack of the need to “get things done,” and attack those who don’t fit their definition of the phrase. We are told we must avoid “gridlock”—another of the mainstream press’s favorite words—in the interests of the American people.

  We have enormous problems, grave challenges in this country right now. And no one has a greater desire to change the path we’re on, and to fundamentally reform this country, than conservatives who have witnessed the eight-year train wreck that has been the Obama administration. We know the violence those policies have done to American families. It is heartbreaking and very real.

  But here’s another oddity about the D.C. lexicon. “Getting things done” doesn’t mean actually fixing the problems we have. It doesn’t mean getting anything positive done. It simply means growing government and doing whatever the Democrats want done—and stopping everything else.

  For example, when Democrats routinely blocked George W. Bush’s nominees, you did not hear members of the mainstream media complaining about Harry Reid contributing to “gridlock” or failing to “get things done.” But when a conservative tries to stop disastrous legislation put forward by the left—such as Democratic gun-grab legislation—pundits seem to rush to television cameras to complain that people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are blocking progress. We aren’t getting things done!

  When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

  Arriving in the Senate, I had been spoiled by my background as a professional litigator, a profession in which matters of import, sometimes matters of life and death, are discussed and debated every day. The rules for a litigator are reasonably simple: You come to the inquiry prepared. You ask questions that require precise answers. And you follow up with questions based on the witness’s answers—or evasions. Pointed interrogations are de rigueur in the legal profession, and they usually aren’t taken personally.

  The Senate is a different beast. Unfortunately, many senators are wholly untrained in this area. Repeatedly, the following pattern plays out at a hearing: A senator reads a question prepared by his or her staff. The witness then dodges the question. And instead of following up with a second and third question based on the witness’s evasion, the senator simply moves on to whichever question the staff has listed next. Even a semi-competent witness can bob and weave enough to avoid admitting important truths.

  For better or worse, I approach questioning quite differently. That’s what I’ve been trained to do. For example, one time when Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Judiciary Committee, I asked him a simple question: “If a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil is not posing an immediate threat to life or bodily harm, does the Constitution allow a drone to kill that citizen?”

  “I would not think that that would be an appropriate use of any kind of lethal force,” he said.

  This was an evasive response. Something can be “inappropriate” without being “unconstitutional.” Purposefully, Holder had not answered my question—so I tried again.

  “With all due respect, General Holder,” I interjected, “my question wasn’t about appropriateness or prosecutorial discretion. It was a simple legal question. Does the Constitution allow a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who doesn’t pose an imminent threat to be killed by the U.S. government?”

  Holder briefly complained about the nature of hypotheticals before again saying that “in that situation, the use of a drone or lethal force would not be appropriate.”

  Another evasion, so I tried a third time. “I have to tell you,” I said, “I find it remarkable that in that hypothetical, which is deliberately very simple, you are unable to give a simple, one-word, one-syllable answer: no.”

  Then, for the third time, Holder replied only that a drone killing “would not be appropriate in that circumstance.”

  Three times I had asked him a simple question with a seemingly obvious answer, and three times he had refused to answer. Only then did he say, with a heavy dose of exasperation, “Translate my [in]appropriate to ‘no.’ I thought I was saying ‘no.’ ” Perhaps this reflected the view of the left that the Constitution itself imposes no meaningful restraints on government power other than whatever the restraints of propriety might be.

  There is a role for drones in military operations overseas. There may also be a legitimate role for drones to act with deadly force to prevent an imminent threat in the United States, like Pearl Harbor or September 11. But there is no plausible argument under the Bill of Rights that the federal government has the authority to use a drone on U.S. soil to target with lethal force a U.S. citizen who poses no immediate danger to the lives of other Americans.

  Later that day, my colleague Rand Paul of Kentucky took the Senate floor to begin a filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA and against the administration’s refusal to answer definitely whether the Constitution permits the use of drones to target U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

  Rand is a good friend, and he and I (along with Mike Lee) have charged into many battles together. When Rand began the filibuster, most of our colleagues did not understand what he was doing. They found the inquiry curious, if not quixotic. Indeed, as we sat at the Senate lunch just a few minutes after Rand had begun, several senators expressed puzzlement as to why the question was even being asked.

  Before he began the filibuster, Rand had asked if I might go down to the Senate floor and support him. This presented me with a dilemma, because there is a tradition that freshman senators wait a reasonable time before going to the Senate floor to speak. Although it might seem hard to believe today, that was a tradition I had honored and respected. Up until that point in April 2013, I had not spoken once on the Senate floor.

  When Rand initially asked, I told him I thought it was too early for me to speak. Just a few months into my term, I was planning to wait at least six months before delivering my maiden speech, out of respect to the institution and its traditions. However, as Rand continued and the fight intensified, I changed my mind.

  It occurred to me that on that very day, 177 years earlier, the Alamo had fallen. So, in part because I love Texas history, and in part because Rand was born in Texas, I brought with me to the floor a letter from the Alamo’s commander, Colonel William Barret Travis. It was among the great honors of my life to read Travis’s letter from the Alamo in my very first speech from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

  In that letter, Travis called on Americans “in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and every thing dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch.” I observed that if the heroes of the Alamo—Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett—were alive today, I was confident they would be standing shoulder to shoulder with Senator Paul fighting to defend our liberty.

  The Senate’s rules for a filibuster allow the senator to keep the floor as long as he or she can. During that time, the senator may not sit down, lean on a desk, or leave the Senate floor, even to go to the bathroom. But the senator can yield to another senator for a question. Often, the questions become lengthy, as one senator attempts to provide time for a filibustering senator to rest his voice. In fact, it is not uncommon for a senator with a “question” to rise and speak for thirty or forty minutes and then end his speech with a question like, “Don’t you agree?” My question for Rand was whether Travis’s letter from the Alamo “gives the senator from Kentucky encouragement and sustenance as he stands and fights for liberty?”

  As the night wore on, I returned to the Senate floor multiple times to support Rand’s filibuster with lengthy questions. I quoted from Sh
akespeare’s Henry V, reading the immortal St. Crispin’s Day speech (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers. . .”). I read from George C. Scott’s opening speech in Patton (cleaned up a bit to make it suitable for C-SPAN). I even did something that I believe is a first in Senate history: I stood on the Senate floor and read tweet after tweet after tweet that Twitter users had posted in support of Rand.

  “Given that the Senate rules do not allow for the use of cellular phones on the Senate floor, I feel quite confident that the senator from Kentucky is not aware of the Twitterverse that has been exploding,” I said, holding printouts of hundreds of tweets. “So what I wanted to do for the senator from Kentucky is give some small sampling of the reaction on Twitter so that he might understand how the American people are responding to his courageous leadership.”

  One of my favorite tweets came from a sixty-three-year-old grandmother. She had never used Twitter in her life, but she signed up that day to stand with Rand. I’m confident that whatever else the future holds, if there ever is a political Trivial Pursuit game, I will be at least an obscure answer to the question of who was the first senator to read tweets on the Senate floor.

  The explosion of the “Twitterverse” was an indication that the attention of the American people was riveted on the Senate floor and the fight for liberty. In fact, the people caught on to the significance of Rand’s stand faster than many of my colleagues did. A number of them had gone home and settled down for dinner—and perhaps retired to bed—but their staff called them at home and said, “You must get back here. You need to be part of this.”

  As the night wore on, one senator after another came to the Senate floor to stand with Rand. Some of them weren’t quite sure why they were there or what they were doing, but the American people had become so energized that these senators knew enough to want to stand alongside those of us engaged in this battle for liberty.

  Unfortunately, with the exception of Oregon’s Ron Wyden, no Democrat joined in that parade of supportive senators. I found this astonishing—and disappointing. For many years, Democrats had prided themselves on their defense of civil liberties, and yet one of the saddest realities of the modern Senate is that today’s Senate Democrats are far more concerned about standing with their political allies in the White House than they are with defending the Bill of Rights.

  After twelve hours and fifty-two minutes, Rand’s filibuster ended—in victory. Before he finally yielded the floor, the White House committed to giving him a written answer to the question that he and many of us had raised. The next day, because so many Americans had focused on that fight, the Obama administration was forced to do what it had refused to do for three consecutive weeks: put in writing that no, the Constitution does not allow the U.S. government to use a drone to target American citizens on U.S. soil.

  On December 14, 2012, a lone gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire on classrooms of little children. He murdered twenty children and six adults. It was the deadliest shooting at a grade school or high school in American history. Every parent, especially every parent of young children, could not help but be horrified.

  But almost immediately, President Obama acted on his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous instruction: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

  After the Sandy Hook massacre, the president could have come out and pressed for stronger law enforcement efforts targeting violent criminals and dangerous individuals with significant mental illnesses. Had he done so, the effort would have been met with bipartisan agreement and swift action in Congress. Instead, the president decided to use this tragedy as an excuse to further his long-standing goals of restricting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.

  In the weeks after Sandy Hook, Democrats were convinced that the president’s aggressive antigun legislation was unstoppable. They were sure that their demagoguery, aided by the active political advocacy of the mainstream media, would make standing up to the president’s assault on our Second Amendment rights politically toxic. And they knew from long experience on other issues that it was not difficult to intimidate Republican senators into jumping on the train. As it so happened, a different outcome was in store.

  The first phase of the battle was the Senate Judiciary Committee, where staunch antigun senators like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer aggressively pressed for legislation. Schumer could not hide his glee as he rocked back and forth, declaring that mandatory government background checks for every private sale between individual Americans should be subject to government supervision. This, he proclaimed, was the “sweet spot” where the legislation would inevitably land. Meanwhile, Feinstein renewed her push for the so-called assault weapons ban.

  The first “assault weapons” ban was passed in the 1990s. It was one of the least effective pieces of legislation Congress has ever passed. After that legislation expired in 2004, the Department of Justice studied its effect and concluded it had precisely zero impact on preventing violent crime.

  I recall in the middle of the debate, my wife, Heidi, a native Californian who was raised on the Central Coast in a vegetarian family that does not live and breathe politics every single day, asked quite innocently, “Should people really be carrying machine guns everywhere they go?” She was surprised when I told her that fully automatic machine guns have been effectively illegal in the United States for general possession since 1934.

  With a confused look, she then asked, “Well, what is an assault weapon then?” I replied that the most accurate definition of an assault weapon under the Democrats’ legislation is “any gun that looks scary.” The definition has nothing to do with the firing capacity of the weapon. It has nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon. It simply has to do with whether the gun looks like the sort of weapon our soldiers carry into battle.

  If, for example, a rifle has a folding stock instead of a solid wood stock, that can make it an “assault rifle.” If a rifle has two pistol-grip handles, that can make it an assault weapon. Indeed, if a rifle has even a single pistol-grip handle, under Dianne Feinstein’s definition that can make it an assault weapon.

  At a Senate hearing, I put up a poster of one of the most popular deer hunting rifles in America. Regularly used by millions of law-abiding Americans, the rifle is not an assault weapon under the terms of the legislation introduced by Senator Feinstein. However, I had with me a $3.95 plastic pistol grip that can be purchased at most sporting good stores. I held the pistol grip up to the rifle and said if you attach the pistol grip, then suddenly this legal weapon becomes an illegal “assault” weapon.

  The debate about guns in Washington, like most other debates, is conducted in a fact-free environment. The data about what works and what doesn’t, about who commits violent crimes, and about which laws prevent violent crimes, are routinely ignored by Democrats whose real goal is disarming America. If you don’t believe me, take the words of the senior senator from California, who stated, “If I could have gotten fifty-one votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them—Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in—I would have done it.”

  Well, at least Senator Feinstein deserves points for honesty, unlike many of her colleagues on the Democratic side, who pretend that their ultimate goal is not a total gun grab.

  Just a few months into my tenure in the Senate, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on Feinstein’s renewed assault weapons ban, which included a hundred-page list of prohibited and permitted firearms. Sitting on the far side of the panel as the committee’s second most junior Republican, I noted that the operative language of the Second Amendment—“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—is the same as the operative language in the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, which protect “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” and “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures.”

  I then asked a simple question of Senator Feinstein:

  Would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment? Namely, would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights? Likewise, would she think that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures could properly apply only to the following specified individuals and not to the individuals that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

  Though the question was delivered calmly and rationally to a fellow colleague on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a twenty-year veteran of the Senate, the reaction was not what I anticipated.

  Senator Feinstein erupted. Defensively, she said, “I am not a sixth grader.” She described having seen “bodies that have been shot with these weapons.” She professed to have “been up close and personal to the Constitution.” She described herself as “reasonably well educated.” And then, noting that some guns were exempted by her legislation, she asked in frustration, “Isn’t that enough for the people in the United States?”

  She did not, however, answer my question. Nor did she even try. Rather, following the very same stratagem that was followed by Democrats in the Hagel nomination, she decided to change the subject and make a personal attack.

  I will confess her reaction puzzled me. Of course she wasn’t a sixth grader. No one would ask a sixth grader a substantive question of constitutional law. The very fact that I asked her the question demonstrated that I had respect for her knowledge. Moreover, it was quite a surprise to me that on an issue as important as this, she had not anticipated a question like mine. Surely, I figured, she had given some thought to the constitutional right she was infringing. Surely she had some sense that there might be qualms raised about a bill so sweeping.