Sen. Ted Cruz

[vector7]

Newt summed it up well...

[Ryan Ruck]

Thanks! Hadn't caught that segment.

The ONLY way Trump sees my vote if he wins the nomination is if he selects Cruz as his VP, in hopes that Trump gets bored in 4 years (or sooner!) and Cruz slides into the Presidency.

Otherwise if there's no Cruz on a Trump ticket, I will have no part in electing a real life Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

Don't really care what the end result is of that decision.

[Ryan Ruck]

Cruz: We're 'One Liberal Justice' From Irreparable Damage

October 23, 2015

The U.S. is "one justice away" from a liberal Supreme Court causing enough damage for the nation to become unrecognizable, Texas Republican Ted Cruz said Friday.

"One more liberal justice and our right to keep and bear arms is taken away from us by an activist court. One more liberal justice and they begin sandblasting and bulldozing veterans memorials throughout this country. One more liberal justice and we lose our sovereignty to the United Nations and the World Court," Cruz said when responding to how he would treat appointing justices to the court.

Cruz, a U.S. senator and presidential hopeful, has made similar statements earlier in the campaign cycle.

After the Supreme Court made rulings upholding the federal health care law and legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, Cruz called for Supreme Court justices to face retention elections.

Cruz was in the middle of a five-stop tour Friday through parts of southwest Iowa as he continues to seek his party's presidential nomination. A new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll released the same day put Cruz in third place in Iowa among likely Republican caucusgoers.

Still, Cruz faces a blockade from neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businessman Donald Trump. Carson took the top spot in the poll and Trump came in second.

Iowa political observers have also noted Cruz has to fend off other competitors – such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal – who are competing for similar voters.

Cruz proving again he really knows what's at stake.

Anyone heard what Trump said about SCOTUS justices?

Yeah... Me either.

[Ryan Ruck]

Some new Cruz video. He just had a 40 minute sitdown with Steven Crowder. Great interview!





And here's the New Hampshire video he referenced.

[Ryan Ruck]

And Allen West posted this photo on his Facebook page yesterday...

Allen West
Page Liked · Yesterday ·

In DC for a couple days. Had a very interesting day today!

[Malsua]

I watched that Cruz video yesterday. I continue to like the guy.

[American Patriot]

Cruz be da man. I think we should make Trump Sec State though, lol. And West Sec Def. And Carson... Surgeon General. Lol.

Or me. Sec Def, pick me!

[American Patriot]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ar...ampaign=buffer

Cruz surges past Carson in new Iowa poll

By Ryan Lovelace (@LovelaceRyanD) • 11/23/15 7:35 AM
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Ted Cruz has surged past Ben Carson in Iowa, according to a new CBS/YouGov poll.
Carson dropped 8 percentage points since CBS/YouGov's October poll, and the Texas senator improved by 9 percentage points, a huge 17-point swing.
Donald Trump has regained his lead in the state, and has the support of 30 percent of those surveyed, while Cruz finished in second at 21 percentage points. Carson now sits in third place at 19 percent, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has fourth at 11 percent, and Jeb Bush is in fifth with 5 percent.
Cruz scores best among all the candidates when Iowans are asked who is ready to be the commander in chief. Approximately 67 percent of Hawkeye State voters think Cruz is ready, 51 percent of respondents think the same of Rubio, and 49 percent of those surveyed think Trump is ready to lead the nation.

[Ryan Ruck]

This is a perfect way to end the rampant H1-B abuse that's going on by many companies. We have 97,000,000 people out of the work force and there is zero reason to be importing workers.

Sen. Ted Cruz wants minimum H-1B wage of $110,000

December 11, 2015

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, has morphed from a vocal supporter of the H-1B program to a leading critic of it. He has done so in a new H-1B reform bill designed to raise the cost of hiring temporary visa workers.

This bill, released late Thursday, sets a minimum wage of $110,000 for H-1B workers, who currently can be paid well less than half that amount in some U.S. regions under prevailing wage rules. This base salary will adjust annually for inflation.

The legislative intent is to do more "to prevent employers from using the program to replace hard-working American men and woman with cheaper foreign labor," said Cruz, in a statement. The bill is co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee.

The bill also eliminates the Optional Practical Training Program (OPT), which provides a means to work via a student visa in the U.S. for at least 12 months. It prohibits employment authorization to anyone on student visa or F-1 status (who is no longer engaged in full time study) under the OPT program or a successor program, "without an express Act of Congress authorizing such a program."

Session called the OPT program "a backdoor method for replacing American workers," in a statement.

Eliminating OPT puts this bill at odds with the administration of President Barack Obama. Administration officials are now working to finalize regulations to give science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students the ability to work in the U.S. under their student visas from the current 29 months to 36 months.

What makes Cruz's bill, titled "The American Jobs First Act of 2015," particularly important is its timing. This proposal by a major candidate seeking his party's presidential nomination may help raise the visibility of the H-1B issue.

This bill also sets Cruz clearly apart from fellow senator and presidential rival Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Rubio has talked about the need to end "abuses" in the H-1B visa program, but remains a co-sponsor of I-Square bill, which seeks a major visa cap increase.

With this bill, Cruz joins program critics who say the H-1B visa is being used displace U.S. workers. Sessions' involvement gives the Cruz effort credibility as a serious visa reform proposal.

"The mass layoff of American workers at Disney, Southern California Edison, and many other companies -- who were then forced to train their foreign replacements -- underscores that our political system has failed in its duty to protect our own people," said Sen. Sessions, in a statement.

Sessions took a swipe at the I-Squared bill, which he says represents industry interests, and "would further drive down wages for American workers."

Rubio has not explained what constitutes abuse in the H-1B program. Some say the replacement of U.S. workers with temporary visa workers is not an abuse, but a feature of the program that's allowed by law. Cruz joins Donald Trump, who is also seeking the Republican nomination, in campaigning on a specific H-1B reform plan.

The Cruz and Sessions bill joins two other H-1B reform bills, one from Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and another from Sen. Bill Nelson.

Cruz's and Sessions' bill requires an employer to commit to paying the foreign workers either what an American worker who did identical or similar work made two years prior to the recruiting effort or $110,000 -- whichever is higher.

During the debate on comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate in 2013, Cruz had sought a 500% increase in the base H-1B cap, from 65,000 to 325,000. This new bill doesn't address the visa cap, with either an increase or decrease, but neither does the bill by Grassley and Durbin.

For its part, the Nelson bill does seek a reduction in the visa cap, and an increase in wages as well. It distributes the visas to employers based on how much they are willing to pay these workers.


"This bill is a bold step to fix the very broken H-1B program," said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University, of the Cruz bill. Hira has testified in Congress on the H-1B visa.

The Cruz and Session bill "eliminates the temptation for employers to replace American workers with H-1Bs. It does this by setting a realistic wage floor, one that is equivalent to the wages earned by the replaced Southern California Edison and Disney workers," said Hira.

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said the wage rule is a "marked improvement over the status quo."

But Costa thought the wage rule "could have been slightly more artfully crafted to protect the higher-earning H-1B workers."

For instance, "a software developer in the Silicon Valley earning the average wage would earn $142,376 -- and the entry level wage is close to $100,000. So if a Silicon Valley tech firm hires an experienced software programmer at $110,00 they'd be getting a bargain," said Costa.

Costa said Cruz and Sessions "deserve a lot of credit for the subsections of the bill that would go a long way to protect foreign workers from being exploited, underpaid and in some cases victims of labor trafficking."

In particular, the bill prohibits H-1B workers from paying penalties to their employers for leaving a job before the date agreed to. It also prohibits employers from requiring an H-1B worker to pay fees for housing, vehicle use and other things.

Hira said the bill also "fills a critical void in the legislative policy discussion by closing President Obama's disastrous" OPT program, which Hira, referring to the administration's new program to extend the program, calls "a three year zero-wage guest worker visa that serves no purpose except to undercut American workers and students."

The OPT program does not include the prevailing wage requirements of the H-1B visa.

The Cruz and Session bill also provides a "layoff cool-off" period of two years, preventing an employer from bringing in an H-1B worker within two years of a strike, layoff, furlough or other involuntary employee terminations.

It includes transparency requirements, with "real-time online updating" of H-1B applications and usage.

The OPT program has been under legal attack, and the STEM extension is now under threat of being eliminated, thanks a lawsuit filed by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, or WashTech.

The only previous statutory authorization for aliens to work in the U.S. while on an F-1 student visa was a three-year trial program that's since expired. Since 1994, all authorizations for aliens to work on student visas have been done solely by regulation, according to a history of the OPT program provided in the WashTech lawsuit.

John Miano, the attorney representing WashTech, said, "Such an expressed ban on non-students working on student visas should not be necessary." In 1981, 'Congress expressly limited F-1 visas to academic students," said Miano.

The OPT program was originally 12 months, but in 2008 the U.S. extended it to 29 months for STEM students and recently proposed making it 36 months. WashTech challenged the extension in court, but last August a federal court said the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security erred by not seeking comment in 2008 about the STEM extension. The U.S. has since sought comment on a new rule, and is preparing a final rule to avoid a court-ordered disruption of the OPT STEM extension.

Sessions is a co-sponsor of the Grassley and Durbin bill, and Nelson's bill as well as Cruz's. In total, the three bills give the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Grassley, a menu of approaches and ideas for reforming the H-1B program.

[Ryan Ruck]

As though you needed any more of a reason to vote for him...

Bob Dole Really, Really Doesn’t Like Ted Cruz

December 8, 2015

On MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" Tuesday, the veteran anchor sat down with former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to talk, ostensibly, about the current state of his party and the rise of Donald Trump. But the Kansas Republican had something else on his mind. And that something else was how much he dislikes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

In a question about what Dole makes of Trump, the former Senate leader quickly turned matters to Cruz. "He's not traditional Republican conservative," Dole said of the Texan. "Achievements are shutting down the government twice, and calling the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, a liar on the Senate floor. It violates the rules of the Senate. And he doesn't have a single Senate supporter."

Later, Mitchell probed as to whether Dole could or would vote for Trump next November. Dole said he would because he can't bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then she asked about Cruz, and Dole joked, "I might oversleep that day," before adding: " 'Cause he used to make these speeches. 'Remember President Dole, do you remember President McCain.' The inference was that we were all a bunch of liberals, and only he is a true conservative. And he uses the word 'conservative' more than he ever uses the word 'Republican.' So, it would be difficult."

What Dole is referring to there is a piece of rhetoric Cruz used extensively in the long run-up to his 2016 presidential bid. "Of course, all of us remember President Dole and President McCain and President Romney," Cruz would say. "Now look, those are good men, they’re decent men. But when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.”

It clearly irked Dole. When he endorsed Jeb Bush's presidential campaign last month, Dole went out of his way to take a shot at Cruz. "I think [Jeb's] the most qualified, and we need somebody with experience and there are a lot of good candidates — I like nearly all of them," Dole said. "Except Cruz.”

Dole's animosity toward Cruz tells you two things:

1) Politics is deeply personal and Dole doesn't like people — especially Republicans — poking fun at his 1996 loss at the hands of Bill Clinton.

2) A MASSIVE amount has changed in the Republican party over the past 30 years. When Dole ruled the party, he was widely regarded as a conservative — albeit one willing to cut deals when the moment required it. Now, he is cast as a Benedict Arnold of sorts by Cruz. And whereas the blueprint for becoming the party's presidential nominee was once Dole (long, loyal service in the Senate), it may well now be Cruz (running against the Senate from the second he got there.)

While much of the focus at the moment is what it would mean for Trump to be the Republican nominee, the prospect of Cruz as the party's standard-bearer makes Republican establishment types in Washington far angrier. In fact, some of the resistance in going after Trump aggressively is based on the idea that such a move might strengthen Cruz. "There's no benefit at this point for the establishment to go after Trump because his votes aren't going to their person," said one high-ranking Republican operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. "They're afraid that will only help Cruz."

Cruz as the nominee would force lots and lots of sitting Republican senators and House members to make a very hard choice: a) refuse to vote for or endorse him or b) grit their teeth and cast a ballot for Cruz. Most would likely choose "b." But maybe less than you think.

I think this may be Cruz's biggest endorsement of his campaign yet!

[American Patriot]

Not a single Senate Supporter?

YES!