Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, has established himself as a leading defender of President Trump’s election challenges, going so far as to say he would plead the president’s case before the Supreme Court if the opportunity arose.
It didn’t. Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the Texas challenge to the certification of election results in four states won by President-elect Joe Biden.
But the offer alone could improve Cruz’s standing with core Trump voters ahead of 2024 and once again raise his profile after the emergence of potential rivals ranging from former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley to Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley. Cruz was the runner-up behind Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.
The lawsuit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by 17 other states Trump carried in November, the president himself, and a majority of House Republicans. It alleged that four decisive battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia — did not follow their election laws and therefore cast doubt on the results. Nearly two dozen other states filed in opposition to this suit.
“The president asked Sen. Cruz on Tuesday night to argue the Texas case, and he told the president that if the Supreme Court took it up, he would do so,” said a Cruz spokesperson.
Cruz is a former Texas solicitor general who has previously argued nine cases before the Supreme Court. The Harvard Law School graduate previously said on Twitter that he stood ready to “present the oral argument” in the Pennsylvania case that justices declined to hear.
Politically, Cruz’s position resonates with the Republican base, including voters who were turned off by his reluctance to endorse Trump after their 2016 primary contest turned nasty. While Cruz eventually threw his support behind Trump, he told delegates at the Republican National Convention that year to vote their conscience in November. Trump had insulted both Cruz’s wife and father. Cruz has been a staunch proponent of the president since Trump took office in 2017.
“A lot of what Cruz has done since the 2016 election can be seen through the prism of reingratiating himself to the Trump base,” said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is not a departure but a continuation of how he has positioned himself toward Trump since their acrimonious relationship in 2016.”
On Thursday, a group of leading conservative activists endorsed the viewpoint that the election was essentially stolen from Trump, including Tea Party leaders who backed Cruz’s election to the Senate in 2012. “The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states — as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups — violated the Constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories,” the conservatives wrote. “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”
Cruz came to Washington as a top conservative bomb-thrower in 2013, leading fights to defund Obamacare and block liberal policy initiatives. He ran for president while still a freshman senator. Since losing the nomination to Trump, he has worked on improving relationships with Senate colleagues — none endorsed him for president, though a number of House conservatives did — and he was reelected in a competitive race against Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 midterm elections.
“This will be a feather in Ted’s cap for 2024,” said a Republican strategist. “The question is whether people see this as sincere.”
“Cruz offering to argue it only serves his shortsighted political interests of pleasing Trump at the cost of his integrity,” said Republican strategist Rick Tyler, a former communications director for the Cruz 2016 campaign who has been critical of the president. Tyler called the Texas case “absurd.”
“Trump retains the overwhelming support of the vast majority of Texas Republicans,” Blank said. “Cruz, like any enterprising politician, is trying to see where the voters are.” And while Trump also had a tighter race than some past GOP nominees, Blank pointed to some polling his institution did in the last two presidential races. In October 2016, 47% of Texas Trump supporters said they were voting for him because they wanted to see him become president versus 53% who wanted to stop Hillary Clinton. Four years later, those numbers had improved to 81% wanting Trump to 19% who wished to stop Biden.
Cruz has backed Trump on his election claims nearly from the beginning. “I am angry, and I think the American people are angry,” Cruz told Fox News’s Sean Hannity two days after Election Day. “Because by throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election.”
