Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to Eleanor Elizabeth (née Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson 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.

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 had two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.

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.

Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 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.

After graduating from Princeton, Cruz attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree. While at Harvard Law, 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, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant”. At Harvard Law, Cruz was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.

Cruz served as a law clerk to J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1995 and to William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, in 1996. He was the first Hispanic to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.

Michael Wayne Haley was arrested for stealing a calculator from Walmart in 1997. Because of Haley’s previous criminal convictions, he was sentenced to 16-and-a-half 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”.

After Cruz finished his clerkships, he took a position with Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, now known as Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, 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.

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.

Appointed to the office of Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, Cruz served in that position from 2003 to 2008. The office was established in 1999 to handle appeals involving the state, 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 Solicitor General, Cruz argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five cases and losing four.

Cruz married Heidi Nelson on May 27, 2001; they have two daughters, Caroline and Catherine. The couple met when Cruz was working on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Heidi took leave from her position as head of the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in 2016 to support Cruz’s run for president. She previously worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice and in New York as an investment banker.

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 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 (including the words “under God”, legally a part of the Pledge since 1954), 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.

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.

After leaving the Solicitor General position in 2008, Cruz worked in a private law firm in Houston, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, often representing corporate clients, until he was sworn in as U.S. senator from Texas in 2013. At Morgan Lewis, he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice. In 2010, he abandoned a bid for state attorney general when incumbent Attorney General Greg Abbott, who hired Cruz as Solicitor General, decided to run for reelection.

Cruz’s victory in the Republican primary was described by the Washington Post as “the biggest upset of 2012 … a true grassroots victory against very long odds”. On January 19, 2011, after U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said she would not seek reelection, Cruz launched his campaign via a blogger conference call. In the Republican senatorial primary, Cruz ran against sitting Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. Cruz was endorsed first by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and then by the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative political action committee; Erick Erickson, former editor of prominent conservative blog RedState, the FreedomWorks for America super PAC, nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin, Tea Party Express, Young Conservatives of Texas, and U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Pat Toomey. He was also endorsed by former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, George P. Bush, and former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese served as national chairman of Cruz’s campaign.

Cruz has called for an end to “overcriminalization, harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and the demise of jury trials”. He supports the death penalty. In his 2012 Senate campaign, Cruz frequently mentioned his role as counsel for the State of Texas in Medellín v. Texas, a 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that Texas has the legal right to ignore an order from the International Court of Justice directing the U.S. to review the convictions and sentences of dozens of Mexican nationals on death row. He has called Medellín the most important case of his tenure as Texas solicitor general.

Cruz had a leading role in the October 2013 government shutdown. Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House Speaker John Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill. In the U.S. Senate, former Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the filibuster attempt because only 18 Republican Senators supported the filibuster. To supporters, the move “signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government”. This move was extremely popular among Cruz supporters, with Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government naming Cruz “2013 Person of the Year” in an op-ed in The Hill, primarily for his filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was also named “2013 Man of the Year” by conservative publications TheBlaze, FrontPage Magazine, and The American Spectator, “2013 Conservative of the Year” by Townhall.com, and “2013 Statesman of the Year” by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. He was a finalist for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2013. To critics, including some Republican colleagues such as Senator Lindsey Graham, the move was ineffective.

Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 government shutdown, even though he cast several votes to prolong it and was blamed by many within his own party for prompting it.

Cruz has used harsh rhetoric against fellow Republican politicians, and his relationships with various Republican members of Congress have been strained. In 2013, he called Republicans he considered insufficiently resistant to Obama’s proposals a “surrender caucus”. He also called fellow Republicans “squishes” on gun-control issues during a Tea Party rally. Cruz’s role in the United States federal government shutdown of 2013 in particular attracted criticism from a number of Republican colleagues. Republican Senator John McCain was reported to have particularly disliked Cruz; in a Senate floor speech in 2013, McCain denounced Cruz’s reference to Nazis when discussing the Affordable Care Act. In March 2013, McCain also called Cruz and others “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans”. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, John Boehner described Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh”; in an interview, Lindsey Graham said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

Cruz has said that when he was a child, his mother told him that she would have to make an affirmative act to claim Canadian citizenship for him, so his family assumed that he did not hold Canadian citizenship. In August 2013, after the Dallas Morning News pointed out that Cruz had dual Canadian-American citizenship, he applied to formally renounce his Canadian citizenship and ceased being a citizen of Canada on May 14, 2014.

Cruz has been described by the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies as a “free trader” and as a “free-trade advocate” by The Wall Street Journal. In 2013, he proposed the abolition of the IRS and the implementation of a flat tax “where the average American can fill out taxes on a postcard”. Cruz is “adamantly opposed to a higher minimum wage”.

In 2013, Cruz stated that America had no “dog in the fight” during the Syrian Civil War and stated that America’s armed forces should not serve as “al-Qaeda’s air force”. In 2014, he criticized the Obama administration: “The president’s foreign policy team utterly missed the threat of ISIS, indeed, was working to arm Syrian rebels that were fighting side by side with ISIS”, calling ISIS “the face of evil”. In a statement opposing US intervention for regime change in Syria, Cruz said, “If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorists will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests.”

In 2013, Cruz voted against the bill to provide a package of federal aid to the East Coast for recovery from Hurricane Sandy because, he said, the bill was “filled with unrelated pork” and “two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy”. The Washington Post disputed this, writing “The bill was largely aimed at dealing with Sandy, along with relatively minor items to address other or future disasters.” The New York Times wrote that “Of 23 examples of extraneous spending that a spokesman for Mr. Cruz provided, all but one—$195 million in discretionary funds for the secretary of health and human services—were Sandy-related or sought to mitigate future storms, as the law required.”

On April 1, 2014, Cruz introduced S. 2195, a bill that would allow the President of the United States to deny visas to any ambassador to the United Nations who has been found to have been engaged in espionage or terrorist activity against the United States or its allies and may pose a threat to U.S. national security interests. The bill was written in response to Iran’s choice of Hamid Aboutalebi as its ambassador. Aboutalebi was involved in the Iran hostage crisis, in which of a number of American diplomats from the US embassy in Tehran were held captive in 1979.

Under the headline “A bipartisan message to Iran”, Cruz thanked President Barack Obama for signing S. 2195 into law. The letter, published in the magazine Politico on April 18, 2014, starts with “Thanks to President Obama for joining a unanimous Congress and signing S. 2195 into law”. Cruz also thanked senators from both political parties for “swiftly passing this legislation and sending it to the White House”.

On April 12, 2014, Cruz spoke at the Freedom Summit, an event organized by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United. The event was attended by several potential presidential candidates. In his speech, Cruz mentioned that Latinos, young people and single mothers are the people most affected by the recession, and that the Republican Party should make outreach efforts to these constituents. He also said that the words “growth and opportunity” should be tattooed on the hands of every Republican politician.

Cruz is a critic of the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States, saying on Fox News in December 2014 that the thaw in relations was a “manifestation of the failures of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry foreign policy” that “will be remembered as a tragic mistake”.

In a 2014 opinion editorial in USA Today, Cruz wrote that auditing the Federal Reserve System was a top Republican priority in 2015 and that he supported legislation that would allow the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen, whose confirmation Cruz had tried to prevent, said in her confirmation hearing that she opposed any audit of the Federal Reserve and that “For 50 years Congress has recognized that there should be an exception to GAO ability to audit the Fed to avoid any political interference in monetary policy.”

In a heated Senate floor speech in July 2015, Cruz accused Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of telling “a flat-out lie” over his intentions to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which Cruz opposes. “What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that not only what he told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again was a simple lie”, Cruz said. His “incendiary outburst” was “unusual in the cordial atmosphere of the Senate”, according to Reuters. In the same speech, Cruz assailed the “Republican majority in both houses of Congresses” for what he called an insufficiently conservative record. His speech, and especially his accusation against McConnell, was condemned by various senior Republican senators, with McCain saying that the speech was “outside the realm of Senate behavior” and “a very wrong thing to do”. Orrin Hatch expressed a similar opinion: “I don’t condone the use of that kind of language against another senator unless they can show definitive proof that there was a lie … And I know the leader didn’t lie.” Cruz alleged that McConnell scheduled a vote on the Ex-Im Bank as part of a deal to persuade Democrats like Maria Cantwell to stop blocking a trade bill; McConnell denied there was any “deal”, and that denial was what Cruz called a “lie”. Hatch said McConnell did pledge to help Cantwell get a vote on the Ex-Im Bank.

Among Cruz’s few close allies in the Senate is Mike Lee of Utah. Cruz has expressed pride in his reputation for having few allies, saying in June 2015 that he has been vilified for fighting “the Washington cartel”.

When Boehner resigned from the House in September 2015, Cruz expressed his concern that before resigning Boehner might have “cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of its tenure”. The next month, the budget agreement passed in the House by a vote of 266 to 187, with unanimous support from Democrats and Boehner, lifting the debt ceiling through March 2017. Cruz called the agreement “complete and utter surrender”.

Cruz delivered one of many State of the Union responses in January 2015.

On March 23, 2015, Cruz started his 2016 presidential campaign for the Republican primaries and caucuses, in a morning speech delivered at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Also, at the same hour, he posted on his Twitter page: “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” He was the first major Republican presidential candidate for the 2016 campaign. During the primary campaign, his base of support was mainly among social conservatives, though he had crossover appeal to other factions within his party, including in particular libertarian conservatives.

HarperCollins published Cruz’s book A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America on June 30, 2015. The book reached the bestseller list of several organizations in its first week of release.

In August 2015, in the wake of the ambush death of a Texas police officer who was gunned down while filling up at a gas station, Cruz said that police are “feeling the assault from the President, from the top on down, as we see – whether it’s in Ferguson or Baltimore, the response from senior officials, the President or the Attorney General, is to vilify law enforcement. That’s wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong. It’s endangering all of our safety and security.”

Cruz rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has said that “the scientific evidence doesn’t support global warming”. He has also said, “They call anyone who questions the science who even points to the satellite data—they call you a, quote, denier. ‘Denier’ is not the language of science. ‘Denier’ is the language of religion. It is heretic. You are a blasphemer. It’s treated as a theology. But it’s about power and money. At the end of the day, it’s not complicated. This is liberal politicians who want government power.” In March 2015, he said that some people are “global warming alarmists” and, citing satellite temperature measurements, said that there had been no significant warming in 18 years.

In 2015, Cruz voted in favor of the USA Freedom Act, which reauthorized the USA Patriot Act but reformed some of its provisions.

In 2015, in the wake of fatal flooding in Texas, Cruz supported federal aid funding; in 2017, he called for federal intervention as Hurricane Harvey approached the coast of Texas.

In January 2016, The New York Times reported that Cruz and his wife had taken out nearly $1 million in low-interest loans from Goldman Sachs (where she worked) and Citibank, and failed to report them on Federal Election Commission disclosure statements as required by law. Cruz disclosed the loans on his Senate financial disclosure forms in July 2012, but not on the FEC form. There is no indication that Cruz’s wife had any role in providing any of the loans, or that the banks did anything wrong. The loans were largely repaid by later campaign fundraising. A spokesperson for Cruz said his failure to report the loans to the FEC was “inadvertent” and that he would file supplementary paperwork.

After the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Cruz said that the winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, rather than Obama, should appoint a new Justice. In June 2016, Cruz blamed the Obama administration for the Orlando nightclub shooting, reasoning that it did not track the perpetrator Omar Mateen properly while he was on the terrorist watch-list. Following the terrorist attack on Nice, France, Cruz said in a statement that the country was at risk as a result of the Obama administration having a “willful blindness” to radical Islamists. With the passing of Fidel Castro in November, Cruz charged Obama with celebrating and lionizing Castro in public statements he made addressing the death. On December 28, after Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech defending the U.S.’s decision to allow a U.N. resolution to pass that condemned Israeli settlements “on land meant to be part of a future Palestinian state”, Cruz denounced the speech as “disgraceful”, and said that history would remember Obama and Kerry as “relentless enemies of Israel”. Cruz also accused the Obama administration of having a “radical anti-Israel agenda”.

As early as 2013, Cruz was widely expected to run for the presidency in 2016. On March 14, 2013, he gave the keynote speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC. He tied for 7th place in the 2013 CPAC straw poll on March 16, winning 4% of the votes cast. In October 2013, Cruz won the Values Voter Summit presidential straw poll with 42% of the vote. Cruz finished first in two presidential straw polls conducted in 2014 with 30.33% of the vote at the Republican Leadership Conference and 43% of the vote at the Republican Party of Texas state convention.

Cruz did speaking events in mid-2013 across Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, all early primary states, leading to speculation that he was laying the groundwork for a run for President in 2016. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin described Cruz as the first potential presidential candidate to emphasize originalism as a major national issue.

In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Cruz received over 7.8 million votes, won 12 states, and earned 559 delegates. He raised nearly $92 million, a record for a Republican primary candidate, much of it from small online donors. The Cruz campaign had more than 325,000 volunteers.

On February 1, 2016, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses. The Iowa win made him the first Hispanic to win either a presidential primary election or caucus. He received 28% of the vote. On February 10, 2016, Cruz placed third in the New Hampshire primary, with about 12% of the vote. On February 21, 2016, he placed third in the South Carolina Republican primary with about 22.3% of the vote.

On March 1, 2016, Super Tuesday, Cruz won Texas by 17%, along with Alaska and Oklahoma, providing him with four state primary victories total. In the Texas primary, he received the most votes in all but six of the state’s 254 counties. On March 5, 2016, Cruz won the Kansas and Maine caucuses, giving him six statewide wins.

On March 8, 2016, Cruz won the Idaho primary with 45% of vote—defeating Trump by 17% and earning his seventh statewide victory. He placed second in Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii. On March 12, 2016, Cruz won the Wyoming county conventions with 67% of the vote and 9 delegates, giving him his eighth statewide win.

On March 22, 2016, Cruz won the Utah Caucus with 69.2% of the vote, versus John Kasich with 16.8% and Trump with 14%. Because he surpassed the 50% winner-take-all threshold, he won all 40 of Utah’s delegates. This win was his ninth. On April 3, 2016, North Dakota elected a slate of delegates dominated by pro-Cruz delegates. Cruz received the support of the majority of the delegates.

On April 6, 2016, Cruz won the Wisconsin primary with 48.2% of the vote to Trump’s 35.1%. It was Cruz’s tenth statewide win. He won 36 of the 42 delegates available in Wisconsin. Trump received the other six. On April 2 and 7–9, 2016, Cruz swept the Colorado congressional district and state conventions, taking all 34 delegates. This gave Cruz his eleventh state win. On April 16, 2016, Cruz won all 14 of Wyoming’s at-large delegates in the state convention. This secured the majority of state delegates, giving Cruz his twelfth state win. On April 27, 2016, Cruz said that, if he were selected as the party’s nominee, he would choose former CEO of HP and fellow 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential running mate. Shortly after losing overwhelmingly to Trump in the Indiana primary on May 3, 2016, Cruz officially suspended his campaign.

Several lawsuits and ballot challenges asserting that Cruz is ineligible to become U.S. president have been filed. No lawsuit or challenge has been successful, and in February 2016, the Illinois Board of Elections ruled in Cruz’s favor, stating, “The candidate is a natural born citizen by virtue of being born in Canada to his mother who was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth.”

In his speech on July 20, the third day of the convention, Cruz congratulated Trump but did not endorse him. He instead told listeners to “vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution”. The speech was met with boos and a negative reception among the crowd. The following day at the Texas Republican delegation breakfast, Cruz defended his choice to not endorse Trump: “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father. That pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go and slander and attack Heidi, that I’m going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father.'” On September 23, 2016, he publicly endorsed Trump for president.

In September 2016, Cruz backed the Obama administration’s plan to sell more than $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

In March 2016, around seven months before the next presidential election, Cruz argued the Senate should not consider Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, saying: “This should be a decision for the people. Let the election decide. If the Democrats want to replace this nominee, they need to win the election”. In September 2020, less than two months before the next presidential election, Cruz supported an immediate vote on Trump’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 2017, Cruz was one of 22 senators to sign a letter to Trump urging him to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Cruz has received more than $2.5 million in campaign contributions from oil, gas and coal interests since 2012. He has a lifetime score of 3% on the National Environmental Scorecard of the League of Conservation Voters.

On January 5, 2017, Cruz voted in favor of a House resolution condemning UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as a violation of international law.

In June 2017, Cruz co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (s. 720), which would make it a federal crime for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the West Bank if protesting actions by the Israeli government.

Cruz opposes net neutrality—which prevents Internet service providers from deliberately blocking or slowing particular websites—arguing that the Internet economy has flourished in the United States simply because it has remained largely free from government regulation. He has argued that net neutrality is the “Obamacare for the internet”. Cruz said that the Obama-era implementation of the principle of net neutrality had the “end result” of “less broadband, less innovation, and less freedom for the American consumer”. In December 2017, after the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality, he mocked supporters of net neutrality as “snowflakes” who were misled by “online propaganda”.

In April 2018, in the blurb for Trump’s entry on the Time 100 most influential people of 2017, Cruz wrote, “President Trump is doing what he was elected to do: disrupt the status quo.” Cruz’s authorship of the blurb was criticized by Charles Pierce of Esquire, Jay Willis of GQ, and CNN’s Chris Cillizza.

Cruz ran for reelection to a second term in 2018. The primary elections for both parties were held on March 6, 2018. He easily won the Republican nomination with over 80% of the vote. He faced the Democratic nominee, U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke, in the general election. The contest was unusually competitive for an election in Texas, with most polls showing Cruz only slightly ahead of O’Rourke. The race received significant media attention and became the most expensive U.S. Senate election in history.

On November 6, 2018, Cruz defeated O’Rourke by a margin of 50.9% to 48.3%.

In July 2018, Cruz spoke at the Rally for Religious Freedom in Asia. He said, “‘It is a pleasure to be here and stand in solidarity for the men and women across this globe who have been persecuted by communists… We must stand united, in shining light, in highlighting heroism, in highlighting courage, in speaking out for those like my family, like so many millions across the globe who’ve seen the jackboot of communism firsthand.'”

In August 2018, Cruz and 16 other lawmakers urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority in western China’s Xinjiang region. They wrote: “The detention of as many as a million or more Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in “political reeducation” centers or camps requires a tough, targeted, and global response.”

On December 18, 2018, Cruz and Senator Tom Cotton put forth a resolution in the U.S. Senate urging the United States to affirm Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Cruz opposes providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children (so-called DREAMers). In February 2018, he was the sole senator to oppose a Republican motion to begin debate on legislation intended to resolve the question of what to do with DREAMers.

Cruz sees the Nord Stream II pipeline as a threat to the security of Europe and the US. In December 2019 he and Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to Edward Heerema, the owner of the offshore pipe layer Allseas, to warn him of sanctions if Allseas did not suspend its work on the pipeline, which would deliver oil from Russia to Germany. A few days later Allseas suspended the work.

In January 2020, after Iran attacked two U.S. military bases in Iraq, Cruz made comments about the change in Iran policy under President Trump, saying that Obama’s policy was appeasement and that the missiles used to attack the bases were bought with money the Obama administration had given Iran.

Cruz and Michael J. Knowles started a podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, on January 21, 2020. The first episodes were summaries of the impeachment hearings of Donald Trump. After the hearings ended the podcast expanded its content to include other topics and interviews, including with Washington politicians such as U.S. Senator Tim Scott, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and actors such as Jon Voight and Isaiah Washington.

On March 8, 2020, Cruz took a temporary leave of absence from his Senate office due to concerns about his contact with a person infected with COVID-19 at the ACU’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Staying at his home in Texas, he avoided contact with colleagues and constituents for 14 days (believed to be the limit of the virus’s incubation period). Cruz said he had been advised chances of his contracting the virus were very low.