Subtly reframing the issue away from “evolving standards of decency” and the Eighth Amendment, Cruz reminded the court of the horrors of sexual violence against kids and that the defendant in this case, “a 300-pound man who violently raped an 8-year-old girl,” was, in Cruz’s words, “exquisitely culpable.” Classic Cruz: possibly brutal, definitely emotional, but forceful and effective.Īnd he meant it. In April 2008, for instance, I watched Cruz argue in favor of maintaining the death penalty for nonhomicide child rapists. As Kruse put it: “By the time he started appearing in front of the Supreme Court in his role as solicitor general, he wasn’t cowed by the august setting, the high ceiling with the gold trim, the smaller-than-expected courtroom, the podium that puts attorneys so close to the justices they have to look up at them.” It was maybe the last time he checked himself, and also the last time I found him perfectly intellectually coherent. He had fully absorbed and integrated with the culture, and he knew that you couldn’t win cases there by burning shit down. He had played in the basketball games at the court’s upstairs gym. My experience watching Cruz argue at the high court mirrors the conclusion of Michael Kruse, who reported in Politico this winter: “In speaking to people who argued against Cruz in the Supreme Court, or who watched Cruz argue there, or who just watched him in practice arguments, called moot courts, at various law schools, I found a dominant recurring theme: He was really, really good, and he got better as time went on.”Īs Kruse also noted, Cruz was perfectly at home at the court. In a 6-3 decision, the court sided with Cruz, ending the federal habeas corpus claims of the Mexican petitioner. Medellín was a challenge to President Bush’s claim that an international treaty applied in the case of a Mexican national on Texas’ death row. Bush administration in an appeal known as Medellín v. Perhaps the most important case he argued in those years-presaging his willingness to go after the GOP establishment- was when he sued the George W. He filed in cases that had nothing to do with Texas, simply to have a bigger voice in the most ideological disputes around the country. But under his leadership, the SG’s office went from filing an average of three friend-of-the-court briefs per year to 70 in his five-and-a-half-year stint. Bush administration, he decided, with the blessing of then–Attorney General Greg Abbott, to transform the office into an engine for nationwide conservative causes. It’s important to understand that when Cruz took over the sleepy Texas solicitor general’s office in Austin in 2003, in part because he had burned too many bridges to succeed in the George W. Like him or hate him, Ted Cruz was never a better version of himself than when he was arguing in front of the U.S.

To see him out on the hustings these past months, indulging in all his worst college-debate tendencies, was to see a man who had strayed from his actual calling. That’s because I’ve also seen Ted Cruz in a room that suited his sense of grandeur (or is it grandiosity?), a room that was actually big enough to contain his staggering personal ambition, but within a system that by necessity checked most of the off-putting cravenness. Putting aside the fact that someone I have been cordial with for more than 20 years has made himself hated, has come to symbolize burn-it-down government obstruction, and who still seems to make up for in volume what he lacks in empathy, I chiefly just felt regret as I watched Cruz campaign for the presidency. Watching Cruz’s halting rise and crushing fall on the campaign trail this season, I’ve seen so many of the same behaviors: the canned absolutist lines the just-add-water outrage machine the too-loud, too-much quality that thrums through every venue until your face hurts.

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