Ted Cruz
Rafael Edward Cruz is an American politician and attorney serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008. Since 2025, Cruz has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee.
After graduating from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts and earning a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, Cruz pursued a career in politics, eventually serving as a policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration. In 2003, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott appointed Cruz to serve as Solicitor General, a position he held until 2008. Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, becoming the first Hispanic American to serve as a U.S. senator from Texas. In the Senate, he has taken consistently conservative positions on economic and social policy. He played a leading role in the 2013 federal government shutdown, unsuccessfully seeking to force Congress and President Barack Obama to defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was reelected in a close race in 2018 and again in 2024. In 2025, he drafted and led the effort to pass the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump. In May 2025, Cruz introduced a bill to create what later became Trump Accounts.
In 2016, Cruz sought the Republican presidential nomination, emerging as a serious competitor to front-runner Donald Trump in a primary marked by intense and often personal exchanges. Cruz initially withheld his endorsement after Trump secured the nomination, but became a supporter during Trump's first term. In 2021, Cruz objected to the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Early life and family
Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Cruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.Cruz's father, Rafael, was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, Rafael Cruz was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.
At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers". In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage. Miriam died in 2011 from a drug overdose.
Cruz began using the moniker "Ted" at age 13.
Education
For junior high school, Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston. Cruz attended two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988. During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat.After high school, Cruz studied public policy at Princeton University. While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship. In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and, with his debate partner David Panton, Team of the Year by the American Parliamentary Debate Association. Cruz and Panton later represented Harvard Law School at the 1995 World Debating Championship, losing in the semifinals to a team from Australia. Princeton's debate team named their annual novice championship after Cruz. At Princeton, Cruz was a member of Colonial Club. His 115-page senior thesis at Princeton investigated the separation of powers; its title, Clipping the Wings of Angels: The History and Theory Behind the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, was inspired by a passage attributed to James Madison from the 51st essay of the Federalist Papers: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect their constituents' rights, and that the last two items in the Bill of Rights offer an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude.
Cruz then attended Harvard Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. He was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. Referring to Cruz's time as a student at Harvard Law, professor Alan Dershowitz said that Cruz was "off-the-charts brilliant". Cruz graduated from Harvard Law in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree, magna cum laude.
Legal career
Clerkships
After law school, Cruz served as a law clerk for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1995 to 1996, and then for Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1996 to 1997.Private practice
After his Supreme Court clerkship, Cruz worked in private practice as an associate at the law firm Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal from 1997 to 1998. At the firm, Cruz worked on matters relating to the National Rifle Association and helped prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. In 1998, Cruz was briefly one of the attorneys who represented Representative John Boehner during his litigation against Representative Jim McDermott over the alleged leak of an illegal recording of a phone conversation whose participants included Boehner.Bush administration
Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser, advising then-Governor Bush on a wide range of policy and legal matters, including civil justice, criminal justice, constitutional law, immigration, and government reform. During the 2000 Florida presidential recounts, he assisted in assembling the Bush legal team, devising strategy, and drafting pleadings for filing with the Supreme Court of Florida and U.S. Supreme Court in the case Bush v. Gore. Cruz recruited future chief justice John Roberts and noted attorney Mike Carvin to Bush's legal team.After Bush took office, Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the United States Department of Justice and as the director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission.
Texas Solicitor General
In 2003, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott appointed Cruz to be the solicitor general of Texas. The office was established in 1999 to handle appeals involving the Texas state government, but Abbott hired Cruz with the idea that Cruz would take a "leadership role in the United States in articulating a vision of strict constructionism". As Texas solicitor general, Cruz argued before the U.S. Supreme Court nine times, winning five cases and losing four. He authored 70 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and presented 34 appellate oral arguments. His nine appearances before the Supreme Court are the most by any practicing lawyer in Texas or current member of Congress. Cruz has said, "We ended up year after year arguing some of the biggest cases in the country. There was a degree of serendipity in that, but there was also a concerted effort to seek out and lead conservative fights."In 2003, while Cruz was Texas Solicitor General, the Texas Attorney General's office declined to defend Texas's sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws banning homosexual sex were unconstitutional. In the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by the attorneys general of 31 states arguing that the Washington, D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. He also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Cruz successfully defended the constitutionality of the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 5–4 in Van Orden v. Perry.
In 2004, Cruz was involved in the high-profile case surrounding a challenge to the constitutionality of public schools' requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow. He wrote a brief on behalf of all 50 states that argued that the plaintiff, a non-custodial parent, did not have standing to file suit on his daughter's behalf. The Supreme Court upheld the position of Cruz's brief.
Cruz served as lead counsel for the state and successfully defended the multiple litigation challenges to the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan in state and federal district courts and before the U.S. Supreme Court, which was decided 5–4 in his favor in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.
In Medellín v. Texas, Cruz successfully defended Texas against an attempt to reopen the cases of 51 Mexican nationals, all of whom were convicted of murder in the United States and on death row. With the support of the George W. Bush administration, the petitioners argued that the United States had violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to notify the convicted nationals of their opportunity to receive legal aid from the Mexican consulate. They based their case on a decision of the International Court of Justice in the Avena case, which ruled that by failing to allow access to the Mexican consulate, the United States had breached its obligations under the convention. Texas won the case in a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court holding that ICJ decisions were not binding in domestic law and that the President had no power to enforce them.
Michael Wayne Haley was arrested for stealing a calculator from Walmart in 1997. Because of Haley's previous criminal convictions, he was sentenced to years in prison under the Texas habitual offender law. After Haley had exhausted his appeals, it became known that Haley's robbery offense occurred three days before one of his other convictions was finalized; this raised a question about the applicability of the habitual offender statute in his case. As Solicitor General, Cruz declined to vacate Haley's sentence, saying, "I think justice is being done because he had a full and fair trial and an opportunity to raise his errors." The Supreme Court later remanded the case to lower courts based on Haley's ineffective assistance of counsel claim. During oral argument, Cruz conceded that Haley had a very strong argument for ineffective assistance of counsel since Haley's attorney failed to recognize the sentencing error and that he would not move to have Haley re-incarcerated during the appeal process. After remand, Haley was re-sentenced to "time served".
In 2008 American Lawyer magazine named Cruz one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America, and The National Law Journal named him one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America. In 2010 Texas Lawyer named him one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.