Before the Senate, Ted Cruz was a champion college debater
In 1992 a Princeton student named Rafael Cruz won top speaker at both the US and North American debating championships and was named national speaker of the year. Princeton later named its novice tournament after him. Within two decades that debater, by then called Ted, had argued nine cases before the US Supreme Court.
Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, in Calgary, Canada, where his parents ran a firm processing seismic data for oil drilling. His mother, from Wilmington, Delaware, had studied mathematics at Rice University; his father had left Cuba in 1957 to study at the University of Texas after opposing the Batista regime. The family settled in Houston, and at 13 the boy began going by Ted. He graduated top of his class from a Houston Baptist high school in 1988.
At Princeton he studied public policy and wrote a 115-page thesis on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, titled after a line attributed to James Madison about angels governing men. Later, as Harvard law students, he and his old debate partner David Panton reached the semifinals of the 1995 world championship. The law professor Alan Dershowitz called him off-the-charts brilliant. After graduating he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
He joined George W. Bush's campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser, and during the 2000 Florida recount helped build the legal team, recruiting future chief justice John Roberts among others. In 2003 Texas attorney general Greg Abbott made him the state's solicitor general. Over five years he wrote 70 Supreme Court briefs and argued there nine times, winning five and losing four, a tally no other practising Texas lawyer has matched. In 2008 American Lawyer named him among the country's 50 best litigators under 45.
Elected to the Senate in 2012, he became the first Hispanic American to represent Texas there, and he later ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
Source: Ted Cruz
