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June 9, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:53

Ted Cruz | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 54

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	In our house, you know, it wasn't that politics was something you just kind of read the paper and, oh, that's interesting.
	I mean, there was an urgency to it.
	It was having principled men and women in office.
	That's how you protect yourself from tyranny.
	And so that's what I wanted to do my whole life.
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
	We're joined by Senator Ted Cruz.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	Senator Cruz, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Really appreciate it.
	Great to be with you, Ben.
	So, first question.
	Where were you the night of December 20th, 1968?
	You know, apparently I was in Northern California.
	It is amazing the time travel.
	I mean, I was at that point just a sparkle in my daddy's eyeball.
	But at the time, I'm blamed for all sorts of things.
	It's a Zodiac killer joke, guys.
	It's a joke.
	He's not actually the Zodiac.
	So I will tell you, on the presidential, periodically, you'd get college kids that would come up with a sign saying, are you the Zodiac?
	And more than once, I pulled them aside and said, son, if I were really the Zodiac, would you want to bring that sign here?
	So, let's start from the premise that you're not the Zodiac Killer, and let's talk about how you got into politics in the first place.
	So, a lot of people kind of know you from the last seven, eight years since you've been in the Senate, but not everybody knows kind of your origin story of the superhero Ted Cruz.
	So, Senator Cruz, where did you get started in politics?
	Well, look, I was a science student, and I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and you know, the rest of it is history.
	I grew up in Texas, and for me, politics is my family story.
	I mean, look, all of us are products of our family story.
	And my dad, as you know, my dad fought in the Cuban Revolution.
	I mean, when he was a kid, when he was a teenager, he was fighting alongside Fidel Castro, fighting against Batista, who was a corrupt dictator, and was thrown in prison and he was tortured.
	And my dad came to Texas when he was just 18.
	And I grew up as a kid hearing stories, hearing stories about being a freedom fighter.
	And it actually works out.
	My father fought with Castro, didn't know Castro was a communist.
	Anytime I really want to yank my father's chain, I'll call him a communist guerrilla and it drives him nuts.
	What he knew was that Batista was corrupt.
	He was in bed with the mob, you know, Godfather II, you know, that whole, I mean, that was, that was what it was.
	It was a completely corrupt dictatorship.
	And the revolution, as my dad describes it, were a bunch of 14 and 15 year old kids who didn't know any better.
	Um, my dad left in 57 and he fled Cuba because Batista's army was going to kill him.
	Um, the revolution succeeds in 59.
	So 59, Castro declares as a communist, begins seizing people's lands, begins executing dissidents.
	And my aunt, my tia Sonia, who I'm very close to, uh, she was still there.
	She's my dad's kid sister.
	And she fought in the counter revolution.
	She fought against Castro.
	She ended up being imprisoned and tortured by Castro's goons.
	And then she, she ultimately fled Cuba too, came to Texas.
	And so my cousin, Bebe and I, Bebe is, is, is Sonia's daughter.
	The two of us as kids, we literally grew up sitting at the feet of my dad and my aunt and listening to them tell stories of, of fighting for freedom.
	And, and, and that's what I've wanted to do my whole life for as long as I can remember since I was a little kid is, is in our house, you know, it wasn't that politics was something you just kind of read the paper and, oh, that's interesting.
	I mean, there was an urgency to it.
	It was having principled men and women in office.
	That's how you protect yourself from tyranny.
	And so that's what I wanted to do my whole life.
	So you ended up going to law school and then being a lawyer for a while.
	So you kind of moved out of the law.
	Did you ever want to stay in the legal profession, go into the judiciary, for example?
	You know, I enjoyed being a lawyer.
	I had a fair amount of success at it and I liked it.
	A lot of my practice was, was arguing in front of the U.S.
	Supreme Court.
	And I have to admit of law practice, that's probably the piece I miss the most.
	The Supreme Court is, it's a unique place and, and it is, It is stunningly fast.
	I mean, one of the wild things about the Supreme Court, if you go and visit the courtroom, and you know how it is, you are surprisingly close to the justices.
	Um, if you're standing at the podium as counsel, you can almost reach out and shake hands with the chief justice.
	The chief justice is probably two feet further away from the council than you are right now.
	And you have nine of the most brilliant lawyers and judges on the planet.
	And, and you know, an argument at the Supreme Court, it's not you standing up there giving grand oratory.
	It is rather you stand up and say, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
	And almost immediately, the justices are firing in question, just coming at you from every direction.
	That was a ton of fun.
	That's something I missed.
	But that being said, I'm very glad to be where I am, which is in the arena of the Senate and fighting for issues and principles that matter.
	So how did you get into elective politics?
	You make the move from the legal profession.
	You decide to run.
	I believe your first run was against David Dewhurst.
	It was.
	And so Senate was the first, first office I was ever elected to.
	First, first office.
	Uh, you know, I joke when I was elected to Senate in 2012, the last thing I'd been elected to before that was student council.
	Um, but, but that's, that's really the truth.
	I mean, I, I had been the solicitor general of Texas, which is an appointed position.
	It's the chief lawyer for the state in front of the U.S.
	Supreme court.
	And I had done that.
	And then I was a lawyer in private practice.
	Uh, but, but when I started running for Senate, the prohibitive front runner was the sitting lieutenant governor of the state, uh, who was worth a couple hundred million dollars, who had universal name ID, who had, I mean, every lobbyist, every special interest, everybody was with him.
	Um, and, and when I started, I mean, I was literally at 2%.
	Uh, you know, I've joked before the margin of error was 3%, but that's actually not a joke.
	We did a poll at the outset of the campaign to see where things were and that was, those were the first results was 2% support below the margin of error.
	Um, and in that campaign we just, we ran a grassroots campaign.
	I mean, we just worked around the clock, traveled the state.
	You know, going to forums, going to Tea Party groups, going to Republican women groups, you know, and the coalition that came together, it was an incredible coalition.
	It was young people.
	It was Hispanics.
	It was, it was police officers and firefighters.
	It was working men and women.
	And it ended up being a grassroots tsunami where we went from 2% to winning the primary by 14 points, winning the general by 16 points.
	And it really, was a breathtaking example of what the grassroots can do when they're energized and engaged and active.
	You came in as kind of the leading edge of the Tea Party wave.
	And obviously at the time there was a lot of talk about Obamacare, a case in which you became incredibly active.
	What do you think has sort of happened to the Tea Party?
	There's been a lot of critiques of what happened to the Tea Party because obviously it was primarily driven by small government concerns.
	Republicans have been in charge of Congress ever since, or at least in charge of the Senate virtually ever since.
	and yet the government is not getting smaller, What do you think happened to the Tea Party?
	Well, I think the Tea Party made an enormous difference.
	And the Tea Party was part of movements that we've seen in this country for a long time.
	You know, several years ago I wrote a book called A Time for Truth.
	And each chapter profiles in the front of it a truth-teller, someone who stood up, often at great risk, and told the truth and made a difference.
	One of the truth-tellers that I highlight is Ross Perot.
	Who Ross Perot, when he ran against Bush 41 and Bill Clinton, I think that he ran a populist campaign.
	He ran a campaign that was defending working men and women.
	And I think actually that Ross Perot campaign where he got 19 percent of the vote nationwide was the initial embers of what became the Tea Party.
	And it also is the initial embers of much of what elected Donald Trump.
	In many ways, the biggest divide we've got in Washington, it's not even Democrat or Republican or left or right.
	It's socioeconomic.
	A divide between working class men and women in this country and the elites in Washington in both parties.
	For a long time, there was a disconnect.
	The Tea Party was an expression of that, of working men and women who were fed up, fed up with economic stagnation, fed up with lack of opportunity, fed up with both parties embracing unchecked illegal immigration and looking for real opportunity.
	I think the Tea Party made a difference.
	Now, where are we today?
	Last two years, we saw some big victories for economic growth.
	We saw the biggest tax cut in a generation.
	We saw job-killing regulations repealed, and we're seeing booming job growth.
	We've got the lowest unemployment in over 50 years.
	That has benefited working-class men and women.
	We're seeing manufacturing jobs coming back to America for the first time in a long, long time.
	That's a victory of the Tea Party.
	If you look at Donald Trump's election, listen, Donald Trump's election was in many ways a giant screw you to Washington.
	And that was a frustration with the career politicians in both parties that elected Trump to begin with.
	Now, you're right on government spending.
	We haven't rained it in.
	And the reality when it comes to spending is on any big spending plan, you get all of the Democrats and about half the Republicans in favor of spending and spending and spending.
	And so that is going to take ultimately, I think, strong presidential leadership to change it.
	But I do think where we are seeing progress, even though we're not restraining spending, we are seeing progress on the economic growth side, that the tax cuts and reg reform is a big, big part of solving the problem.
	And then I think beyond that, we need structural solutions.
	We need things like term limits.
	I'm a passionate advocate for term limits because it structurally changes how Washington works.
	Let's talk about term limits for a second, because I know that this has become a big talking point on the right.
	I'm personally pretty ambivalent about term limits, just in the sense that, to me, the final repository of power is in the people.
	If they feel like electing a congressperson 11 times, I suppose that that's their right.
	I would prefer they not.
	But why do you think that that restriction is necessary, as opposed to simply saying to the people, you know, vote somebody out?
	I mean, you took out a guy who is much more favored in your Senate race.
	So look, I understand that sentiment and there are times even when I've been pretty amenable to it.
	I don't think it recognizes the reality of the political process today.
	Number one, there are massive advantages with incumbency.
	Incumbency in terms of free media, in terms of money, in terms of infrastructure, it's incredibly difficult to defeat an incumbent.
	But number two, You know, it's interesting, I used to be a supporter of term limits until I got in the Senate, and now I'm a thousand times more a supporter of term limits.
	Because what I've seen, the dominant instinct, Ben, in the Senate, and it's true in the House also, is risk aversion.
	You know, there's an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people.
	There's enormous truth to that.
	You've got old, fat, bald guys who were the unpopular kids in high school who suddenly get elected to Congress and they go to a cocktail party and they're handsome and they're witty and they're wise.
	They tell a joke and everyone laughs.
	And it becomes like a narcotic.
	And what happens is incumbent members of Congress, their dominant focus is, I must get reelected no matter what.
	And so on any big issue, on any big choice, If there's a serious solution, the reasoning often is, you know what, if we do that, that entails risk.
	And if there's risk, I might not get reelected.
	If I don't get reelected, who am I?
	And so one of the big virtues of term limits is that it ends the phenomenon of career politicians.
	I've introduced, I'm the author of a constitutional amendment in the Senate, to term limit senators, to two terms, term limit house members to three terms.
	And the virtue of that is, is that at least you throw the bums out and bring new people in.
	And, and I think you're more likely to have, I hope, a Congress that is responsive to the people because the elected officials are not just obsessed with staying there for life.
	So I want to go back to the Tea Party question for just one second, because the fact is that if you look at the left's perspective on the Tea Party, the way that the left describes the Tea Party is it was effectively a racist movement that disguised itself as a small government movement.
	And the proof of that is that once the Republicans took power, there was no move toward small government at all.
	There was just a move toward All the other stuff, the tax cuts and maybe some regulatory reform.
	So what happened to the priorities?
	Was it really just an anti-Obama movement or was it a principled movement about the growth of government?
	Well, look, number one, the left's response to everything is that it's a racist attack.
	That's their standard.
	They don't want to engage in ideas.
	They don't engage in substance.
	So they just scream bigot and anyone who disagrees with them.
	I mean, look, I saw on Twitter recently where someone was accusing you of being a Nazi or encouraging Nazis.
	Like, what the hell are they talking about?
	I mean, that's that's.
	Lunatic fringe stuff, but it, but it's mainstream media.
	Um, so you, you had the tea party.
	If you have a, a, a gathering, a rally of, of tens of thousands of people, you know what, in any gathering of tens of thousands of people, you can find one or two with tinfoil hats who are nuts.
	And if you go with a TV camera and look, you're going to find someone who thinks that, and that's who the media focused on.
	They'd go and find one or two people who are on sort of the outer fringe and say, this is the whole tea party.
	Tell you who Tea Party activists were.
	They were regular people.
	They were working class men and women.
	They weren't the people who had lobbyists.
	They were the people who, you know, tea stood for tax enough already.
	It was a movement that was focused primarily on taxes, on spending, on debt and on economic growth.
	I do think.
	We've moved away from some of the corruption of Washington, from some of the swamp.
	And I think the Trump administration has been positive in that regard.
	Um, it's still the case that government keeps growing and growing.
	But you know, look, one of the things the media never covers, we passed a major tax cut in December of 2017.
	Federal tax revenues since that tax cut have gone up.
	In other words, the federal government is taking more money in, more revenues in, with lower tax rates.
	Now that doesn't surprise you and it doesn't surprise me, in part because we know something about history.
	If you look back, JFK campaigned on cutting taxes, he cut taxes in office and federal tax revenues went up.
	Ronald Reagan campaigned on cutting taxes, he cut taxes in office and federal revenues went up.
	Now, the reason that the deficit and the debt keeps growing is that spending is growing even beyond that.
	But I do think the first piece of it, the economic growth, is important.
	And I'm going to continue fighting for both pieces of it.
	So in one second, I want to ask you about the possibilities of some form of entitlement reform, because Republicans talk a lot about it and then seem not to do much about it.
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	Alrighty, so let's talk about entitlement reform.
	So Republicans are constantly talking about we need to reform entitlement.
	66% of our spending is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
	Everybody knows this stuff.
	Everybody knows that we're going to bankrupt ourselves within the next 15 years if we do nothing about it.
	And yet it seems like there's very little taste for this, including at the presidential level.
	President Trump said in 2016 he has no interest in touching entitlements.
	Do you basically see this as just a train that we are going to drive into Eastwood Gulch?
	I mean, is that where we are going or is there a possibility of change?
	I think to see real entitlement reform, we're going to have to see leadership from the top.
	And you're right.
	Donald Trump didn't campaign on entitlement reform and, and, uh, he doesn't seem focused on, on leading in this regard.
	Without that, it's not going to happen.
	I think ultimately it's critical to the solution.
	I'm, you know, two thirds of the federal spending or our entitlement programs are mandatory spending that grow.
	We could eliminate everything else and that still doesn't solve the problem.
	Of course, we're not going to eliminate everything else.
	Um, I will say also, I think it's possible to engage and engage proactively on entitlement reform.
	So for example, for a lot of years, let's take social security.
	Social security was treated as the third rail of politics.
	You touch it, you get electrocuted.
	Well, I can tell you in 2012 when I got elected to the Senate the first time, I campaigned on it.
	In 2018, I campaigned on it.
	And I think what politicians in Washington are doing right now is irresponsible, both parties, because they're allowing social security to careen towards insolvency.
	And I think it is a critical bulwark that millions of Americans rely on.
	So how do we reform it?
	Four specific principles.
	Number one, seniors, those on Social Security or near retirement, no changes at all.
	Nothing.
	Zero.
	Not a penny.
	We've made promises.
	People have counted on it.
	They've ordered their financial affairs.
	We need to honor those promises.
	But for younger workers, people your and my age, it is hard to find someone in their 30s or 40s who believes Social Security will be there for us.
	That's an incredible opportunity for reform.
	If we've got a generation who understands this is headed towards insolvency, three critical reforms for younger workers.
	Number one, gradually increase the retirement age.
	When Social Security was enacted, life expectancy was much, much less.
	People are working a lot longer.
	Gradually increase the retirement age for younger workers and give us time to plan on it and arrange our finances accordingly.
	Number two, change the rate of growth of Social Security benefits so that it matches inflation instead of exceeding inflation.
	Those two changes bring Social Security into solvency.
	But the third change for younger workers I think is the most important.
	Allow younger workers to keep a portion of our tax payments in a personal account that we own, that we control, that we can invest, and that we can use in addition to the retirement payment, and that we can pass on to our kids and grandkids.
	That is transformative.
	It is something I've been fighting for since I arrived in the Senate, and I intend to keep fighting for it.
	So I want to talk about the future of the Republican Party from two particular angles.
	I want to talk about it from the conservative angle, like where the attacks are coming from on the right and where the attacks are coming from on the left.
	So let's start with the right.
	It seems like, at least in 2016, there was this emerging gap between the, quote unquote, populist conservatism of President Trump and sort of the classical old school conservatism that you were representing in the 2016 race.
	And in the end, it seemed as though the populist conservatism was was ascended.
	I never really bought into the idea that populist conservatism was an ideology.
	It seemed like more of an affect to me.
	And in terms of policy, President Trump has basically governed like a conservative with the absence of any sort of spending cuts.
	Do you think that there is such a thing as populist conservatism and how much how much, I guess, attention should be paid to the prevarications of people who say that the future of the Republican Party lies in things like tariffs and government involvement and subsidies and all that sort of stuff?
	You know, look, I do think there is such a thing as populism, but I'm going to a little bit fight the hypo and reject the characterization.
	You know, I'm very much a Reagan conservative, but I think Reagan was a populist.
	If you look at free market principles, they are all about working men and women.
	They are all about opportunity.
	They're all about Folks like my dad, when he came from Cuba with nothing, having an opportunity, he washed dishes making 50 cents an hour, but he was in an economic environment where you could climb that economic ladder.
	And so, you know, if you look at 2016, we talked a little bit earlier about the socioeconomic divide.
	2016 Republican field, there were 17 Republicans running.
	And if you were laying odds in D.C.
	or New York at the beginning of the campaign, who was going to be the nominee?
	Who was going to win the election?
	Nobody would have bet on Donald Trump.
	And actually, nobody would have bet on me either.
	We might have been 16 and 17 in the betting odds.
	There were a bunch of other candidates that were supposed to be the dominant juggernauts.
	If you fast forward to the primaries, if you look at almost every state and if you look at working class voters, Working class voters in almost every state, either Trump was one and I was two, or I was one and he was two.
	And it is almost perfectly correlated.
	The states where I was one and he was two among working class voters are the 12 states I won.
	The states where he was one and I was two are the states he won.
	And none of the other 17 candidates won more than a single state.
	Kasich won Ohio, Rubio won Minnesota, and Trump and I won the other 48.
	Now that utterly upended Washington conventional wisdom.
	But the reason that happened, I believe, is because Washington politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, were not responding To the Ohio steel workers, to the truck drivers, to the waitresses, to the, to the cops and firefighters, to the men and women with calluses on their hands.
	So when I hear populism, that's what I think about is who are you fighting for?
	And, and look, big government and socialism, the Democrats fight for the elites, for the special interest.
	Under Obama, the rich got richer.
	Big government and big business do great together because big business gets in bed with big government.
	My view, listen, I'm very skeptical of big business.
	I'm interested in small businesses.
	I'm interested in the next generation of creative destruction and entrepreneurs.
	And so I think Breaking the corporatist cronyism of Washington was a very important issue in 2016.
	And those same working class voters, by the way, that decided the 2016 primary are also the voters who won the general election, who gave Trump the victory over Hillary Clinton.
	So I think in that regard, now that doesn't mean.
	As the media pundits want to say that you suddenly have a whole dramatically new agenda.
	If you look at what Trump has actually enacted, I've worked very closely with the president on this tax cuts, repealing job killing regulations, securing the border, rebuilding the military.
	Those are conservative values, but they respond to the working men and women in this country.
	So the sort of left-wing critique of republicanism is that if you look at, let's say, the 2016 primaries, where you're finishing high and Trump is finishing high, and you look at your economic theories, your economic theories are very dissimilar.
	You went into Iowa and what I thought was an incredibly brave move.
	You said no more subsidies for ethanol, which in Iowa is basically political suicide.
	And then you proceeded to win Iowa, whereas President Trump went in there and basically said, look at Senator Cruz.
	He's the one out there saying that or lying dead, as he put it.
	And he's the one out there saying that, you know, he's going to take away your subsidies.
	So, in other words, you guys were sort of at odds on economics.
	So putting in the same basket economically, the critique of the media and the left would say is is not supremely accurate.
	What they would say is that this is a culture war issue.
	That basically there are a lot of people in the middle of the country who are sick of being disrespected by the media elites on both coasts who had treated them as the great unwashed masses and that you were giving them respect and President Trump was giving them respect.
	That's the nice way of putting it from the left.
	The bad way of putting it from the left is obviously that all these unwashed masses are, in fact, unwashed masses and that you unified them because there was a covert racism to to your campaign or to President Trump's campaign.
	That gets back to what we were saying earlier.
	But it does raise a question, which is how can the Republican Party reach out beyond its sort of traditional constituency?
	I know there's a lot of talk about this leading up to 2016.
	Obviously, you're Hispanic.
	Senator Rubio is Hispanic.
	There was a lot of talk about this kind of the new faces of the Republican Party.
	And then the guy who wins the presidency is a is a 70 year old white guy from New York.
	And so there is a lot who who was making some appeals that that were certainly, you know, controversial, to say the least.
	What do you make of that critique and how does the Republican Party move into new audiences?
	Well, I think, first of all, I remember down in South Carolina, right before the South Carolina primary, I was doing a media gaggle.
	And one reporter asked said, what do you do about the fact that the Republican Party are a bunch of old white guys?
	And I just started laughing.
	I said, excuse me, have you looked at the field?
	We have an African-American, world-famous physician.
	We have Carly Fiorina, a Fortune 50 CEO.
	We have two sons of Cuban immigrants, both in their early to mid-40s.
	Compare that to the Democratic Party.
	It's like that 70s shows.
	You had a bunch of septuagenarians battling it out.
	And by the way, fast forward to today, it seems now they're, they're, you know, octogenarians.
	By the way, if all of these folks can run, one word I'll say to our Democratic friends, you know, Jimmy Carter is still alive and he only served one term.
	I mean, if they're, if they're going for yesteryear, I think they need to recruit Jimmy Carter.
	Look, the Democratic Party is a throwback to old and failed ideas, and they're galloping that way.
	Now, one of the challenges we have is we have a one of the great virtues of the age of Trump Is is fake news has been exposed.
	You know, you remember a few years ago, people used to argue, oh, the media isn't biased.
	Nobody argues that anymore.
	I mean, they're so plainly unhinged.
	You watch these reporters foaming at the mouth.
	You watch these networks that they hate Trump so much.
	Now, listen, you and I both had our disagreements with Donald Trump.
	But but you look at just the naked, irrational hatred of the media left.
	Directed at Trump, and that is revealing of who they are.
	Now the challenge is, and this is a challenge for you and for me and for everyone, is to get folks that are not living and breathing this every day, get young people and Hispanics and African-Americans and suburban moms to understand and focus on the substance and the issues.
	These policies matter.
	Listen, if you're a young person, it matters when you come out of school, whether you have booming economic growth and lots of job opportunities or whether you move into your parents' basement because the economy is so stagnant as it was under the Obama years that you can't get a job.
	But we've got to communicate it.
	We've got to get it around the media filters that don't want anyone to hear that truth.
	So what sort of message do you purvey there?
	So one of the things that's been fascinating to me, I'm from California, the Republican Party has been eviscerated among Hispanic voters in California.
	That is not what has happened in Texas.
	In Texas, what is it, a 55-45 or 60-40 split in favor of Democrats, but it's certainly competitive with Republicans.
	Here it's something like 80-20 in favor of Democrats, if that, it may be higher.
	So what has been done in Texas?
	What have you done in your races to help draw Hispanic voters?
	So look, in Texas in 2012, I got 40% of the Hispanic vote.
	In 2018, I got 42% of the Hispanic vote.
	And that is despite the media demagoguing like crazy.
	And listen, I think the Hispanic community is a fundamentally conservative community.
	If you look at the values in our community that resonate.
	Family, patriotism, hard work.
	You know, a friend of mine years ago asked an interesting question.
	He said, when's the last time you saw an Hispanic panhandler?
	I gotta tell you, I don't think I ever have.
	Because frankly, in Hispanic culture, it would be seen as shameful to be out there on the streets begging.
	And yet, You look at hard work, individual responsibility, and those are conservative values.
	And you also look at what unifies the Hispanic community, which is the immigrant experience coming to America seeking freedom.
	That is a message that resonates.
	But I'll tell you, I had the exact same message in the Rio Grande Valley and overwhelmingly Hispanic communities that I had in deep East Texas.
	And the message of jobs and freedom and security, that's a message that resonates.
	Now, listen, California is a special place.
	I'll tell you, it's interesting.
	When I'm out in California, I'll get together with conservatives, with Republicans, and it's almost like conservatives in California are beaten down.
	I'll tell you a point, though, that a lot of people don't know.
	Do you know what state has the most Republicans?
	By numbers, we do.
	I mean, it's a very popular state.
	There are more Republicans in California than there are in Texas.
	Every California Republican I tell that to is shocked and amazed.
	Now, there are even more Democrats.
	I'm not saying that conservatives are not outnumbered here, but a lot of the California conservatives and Republicans are just beaten down.
	They don't believe that they can change the state politics.
	But look, I think the Hispanic community.
	is a conservative community, but we've got to respond to the needs and interest and values in the Hispanic community.
	If you look right now, today we have the lowest Hispanic unemployment ever recorded.
	We've also got the lowest African American unemployment ever recorded.
	Now, the clown show that is the Democratic 2020 primary, None of them are going to admit that.
	They're going to go to Hispanics and African-Americans that are seeing the lowest unemployment ever recorded, and they're going to say, these policies are terrible for you.
	You should go back to the Obama era policies where you had much higher unemployment, much higher poverty.
	That is nonsense.
	Let me give you one of my favorite stats of the last two and a half years.
	The last two and a half years, five million people came off of food stamps.
	Five million.
	And look, as Republicans, we've got to be able to articulate that and explain it in a way that that's not just a number on a pie chart.
	Those are five million real human beings.
	Those are moms and dads who two and a half years ago, they were dependent on the federal government for their basic food needs, who now presumably they've gotten a job.
	They're coming home tonight.
	They're carrying a bag of groceries.
	They're setting it down on the kitchen table.
	And those moms and dads are looking their kids in the eyes.
	They're having the dignity of work, the self-respect of work.
	That is what the American dream is all about.
	Being able to provide for your family, achieve your dreams.
	But we've got to communicate and tell you in the Hispanic community, that is a powerful message.
	Hispanics don't want to be dependent on government.
	And what, what, what the socialists, what the Democrats say is they want them to be dependent on government.
	They want them to be a vassal dependent state, vote for Democrats and be trapped in dependencies.
	What I, what I know Hispanics want is the independence to chase their dreams.
	That is a conservative message.
	So, you were somehow able to defeat the second coming himself, the greatest candidate in the history of American politics, Beto O'Rourke, who skateboarded in from the heavens.
	Well, apparently not smoking a doobie, which is shocking to me.
	And then you defeated him and relegated him to eating dirt.
	And then he actually did this.
	He went to New Mexico and he ate ceremonial dirt.
	And then he decided to run for president.
	Apparently the dirt didn't do him any good because the media have fallen out of love with Beto.
	So to me, this is a media story.
	They created him from nothing, and now they have sent him back to the dust from once he Well, listen, I think he is a talented politician.
	that race went and how much of that was just media hype?
	Well, listen, I think he is a talented politician.
	I also think that the heart of his base was the media who were just enthralled with him.
	There was, I think, a macro in every story.
	If you're writing a Beto profile, it automatically populated with the adjective Kennedy-esque.
	In fact, I think your publisher wouldn't, your editor wouldn't publish it without Kennedy-esque.
	They'd talk about his hair and his teeth and his smile.
	And it was just, it actually read like, you know, Teen Vogue.
	I mean, it was talking about the latest heartthrob And, look, it ain't complicated.
	If you're a leftist journalist and you could beat one Republican in the country who was on the ballot in 2018, it'd be me.
	You know, you and I are not supposed to exist.
	You're an Orthodox Jew who is not a hard leftist.
	That, from their perspective, how dare you?
	Embrace a different view.
	I'm an Hispanic son of an immigrant who believes in freedom and believes in conservative values.
	That drives the left out of their mind.
	And so you saw the media just rush in with this glowing adulation.
	You can trace the point that changed, and it was the day after the general election, when suddenly Beto is not running against me, but is running against a bunch of other leftists, is running against Bernie Sanders, is running against Kamala Harris.
	And the media turned.
	I mean, it it is stunning.
	I mean, they turned.
	Here is a classic illustration.
	Reuters.
	In 2017.
	Had evidence that O'Rourke was part of a hacker cult as a teenager and may have committed multiple felonies.
	They went and interviewed, Reuters interviewed Beto in 2017.
	He admitted it all, said, yep, yep, I did that.
	And Reuters said, I'll tell you what, we will embargo this.
	We won't publish it for a year and a half.
	We won't publish it until after the November 2018 election.
	You know, everyone knows we got to do everything we can to beat Cruz.
	After that, we'll publish it.
	So they came out now, you know, the, the sort of weird fan fiction he wrote as a kid, the, the, the bizarre stuff like fantasizing running over children.
	All of that came from Reuters is reporting that they just sat on, they put on ice for a year and a half until after the election.
	Now, what do you think of the odds, Ben?
	If they had evidence that I'd committed multiple felonies that they'd say, gosh, we'll just sit on it for a year and a half and not publish it.
	This is, in fact, the best proof that you're not the Zodiac Killer, because if you were, there is no question they would have uncovered this and brought it out against you.
	True enough.
	OK, so let's talk for a second about sort of your image as portrayed by the media over the course of your career.
	So you start off, you win this stunning victory against David Dewhurst.
	I remember I was there.
	I remember you coming from nowhere to win this victory against a very heavily favored opponent.
	And then you start kind of climbing the ranks in the sense that you're getting all sorts of media attention, you're giving speeches on the Senate floor, and then came the point where it seemed like the world turned against you, and that was when you decided to filibuster the Obamacare vote.
	Where you got up and you started talking about how the Republican majority leader had failed to stop Obamacare properly.
	What was your motivation for doing that?
	I know that the take from cynical politicos was that it wasn't going to be effective, so it was basically you just grandstanding.
	And then there was the take from other conservatives who were basically saying, no, somebody has to stand up and do this or it's going to get funded and it's never going to go away.
	Why did you do that?
	Look, I did it for two reasons.
	Number one, Obamacare was going into effect.
	And once it went into effect, it was going to prove incredibly difficult to unwind.
	And number two, I had promised the people of Texas, I told the voters of Texas in 2012, I said, if you elect me, I will fight with every ounce of strength in my body.
	I will lay in front of a speeding train to stop this disaster that is Obamacare.
	That was a promise.
	And so what I endeavored to do each and every day, and I still do, is keep those promises.
	You're right.
	The media pounded the heck out of me.
	Republican leadership pounded the heck out of me.
	The left pounded the heck out of me.
	But to be honest, I really don't give a flip.
	And part of it is because I try to remember who I'm working for.
	You know, I remember back in 2012, I remember a little old lady up in East Texas who grabbed me by the shoulder.
	She said, Ted, please, don't go to Washington and become one of them.
	You know, in many ways, being elected with a grassroots movement, it's liberating.
	Because when I was elected, every lobbyist in the state was against me, just about.
	Every major corporation was against me.
	Every major trade association was against me.
	That means I'm not beholden to any of them.
	What I am beholden to are the truck drivers and oil field workers and college kids and all the working men and women who knocked on doors, who worked their hearts out.
	And so I tried to On every decision, say, all right, how would I explain it to the men and women that I sat in town hall after town hall after town hall with?
	And when it came to Obamacare, what, what Republican leadership was content to do is do nothing.
	That was not acceptable.
	And I, and I'll tell you, you know, in the middle of that, that Obamacare filibuster, Where I spoke for 21 hours on the Senate floors, the phones lit up, millions of phone calls went into Congress.
	Republican leadership hated that because the American people said, we don't want this disaster that is Obamacare.
	If you remember, the Wall Street Journal did an editorial where it called me the minority maker, said Ted Cruz is going to single handedly keep Harry Reid as majority leader.
	Now, if in the 2014 election, Republicans had been decimated and Harry Reid had remained majority leader.
	How quick do you think all those media pundits, all that Republican leadership would have been to victory lap and said, aha, see, we told you this fight is destroying our majority, which they said every day.
	In 2014 Republicans won nine seats in the US Senate.
	We retired Harry Reid as majority leader and we won the biggest majority in the house since I believe 1928.
	And not a one of the folks in leadership thought, gosh, maybe the fact that we were standing up and fighting on Obamacare and finally doing something and finally trying to honor our promise, maybe that has something to do with people showing up.
	And voting.
	I think the way you win elections, look, the Washington conventional wisdom is you win elections by standing for nothing, by getting along and going along.
	I think the way you win elections by giving people a reason to vote, by standing and saying, look, we're going to follow through and do what we said we would do.
	That gives people a reason to go knock on doors.
	That gives people a reason to make phone calls.
	In 2016, in the presidential race, my campaign had 326,000 volunteers knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending emails.
	As a way of perspective, the Hillary Clinton campaign talked about their target for the general election was 10,000 volunteers.
	We had 326,000.
	We ended up raising over $92 million, which is the most money any Republican has ever raised in a presidential primary in history.
	That came from 1.8 million contributions.
	That's what happens when you actually just, you just do what you said you would do.
	None of this is rocket science.
	It's actually why, look, there's some Republicans who run in their states as moderates.
	For those Republicans, I'm not mad at them when they vote as moderates.
	I think that's honest.
	I may disagree with them on a policy issue, but if they tell the voters, here's where I stand, then, then, then if they vote that way, all right, that's democracy.
	What I think the voters resent is those same people that were blasting me when they're out campaigning.
	They tell people, I'm just like it.
	And then they get to Washington and say, no, no, no, let's not actually do what we said we would do.
	Look, when Trump astonished the media class, astonished Washington by winning, I think it was right at the heart of The American people fed up with people in Washington not doing what they said, and they believe this guy's going to blow up Washington.
	And I think we've seen some good results, not all good results, but a lot of good results because of it.
	So you run this very knock-down, drag-out race with President Trump.
	Honestly, you have a lot more wherewithal than I would have.
	I mean, he attacked you as Lyin' Ted, he attacked your father, he suggested that he was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he attacked your wife, and you kind of Look, you can't take any of this personally.
	You have to have a thick skin.
	And it is, I guess, a virtue in politics or the media to be able to be whacked in the head with a stick and keep on going.
	Did I like what Trump said in the primary?
	No.
	That being said, he's not the first person to have thrown insults to me.
	He's not the last person.
	That's that's the environment we live in.
	Now, I try not to respond in kind.
	You don't see me vilifying and insulting the character of others, whether Republicans or Democrats.
	I'll engage with them on ideas.
	I'll talk to you about why Bernie Sanders ideas are terrible.
	But, you know, I don't I don't play that way.
	You know, when it came November 2016, when Trump won, I faced a choice at that time.
	It would have been easy to have my feelings hurt.
	It is very difficult to find something that will piss me off more than going after my family.
	So I was not happy about that.
	But I had a job to do.
	I'm elected to represent 28 million Texans.
	And if I had taken my marbles and gone home, I wouldn't be doing my job.
	And so, you know, I got on a plane, I flew to New York, went to Trump Tower the week after the election in November.
	And I said, Mr. President, this is an historic opportunity.
	We've got both houses of Congress and the White House.
	We've got to deliver on our promises.
	And I told him that I said, Mr. President, I want to do everything humanly possible.
	To help bring Republicans together so we can do what we said we would do that at the end of the day.
	That's why I ran for Senate.
	I believe this stuff.
	I believe in low taxes, low regulation.
	I believe in liberty.
	I believe in the Constitution.
	These principles work.
	And if we had wasted that window of opportunity, it would have been a tragic missed opportunity that might never come again.
	By the way, if you're given control of both houses of Congress in the White House and you blow it and do nothing.
	Nobody would fault the voters for saying, you know, why vote for these clowns?
	They don't do anything.
	We at least, in the two years we had it, we delivered a great deal.
	I wish we delivered more, and I was pressing very hard to deliver more.
	But I'm really grateful for everything we did deliver.
	And so that's why I work with the president.
	I don't like everything he says.
	I wish he would say some different things and do some different things.
	But I do like the policy victories that we've won for the people of Texas and the American people.
	And the booming economy and the improved national security that we're seeing are both direct results of that.
	So I don't want to turn you into a political pundit, but I would be remiss because I've been asking everybody this, and I think everybody's asking this.
	How do you think that the 2020 race goes?
	Because, you know, from my perspective, the president's got a very good record.
	He's got a lot to run on.
	At the same time, he says things that alienate vast swaths of the American population.
	Where do you think this is going in 2020?
	Listen, I'm worried about 2020.
	I think it's 50-50.
	I think it's a coin flip.
	I think the country is deeply divided.
	It is an incredibly polarized country.
	And I think it all comes down to turnout.
	I think the left is going to show up in massive numbers.
	And it all comes down to who shows up on the center right.
	If conservatives stay home, if working class voters stay home, we could see devastating losses.
	We could see losing the White House and losing the Senate with massive harm to the country as a result.
	On the other hand, if we turn people out, we could have a great victory.
	We could retake the House and, and, and, and, and hold, hold the White House and have the president reelected.
	You know, I actually think a very good, um, crystal ball for 2020 is what happened in 2018, in particular in Texas in 2018.
	So if you look at the Texas Senate race where the media was all in, uh, Beto O'Rourke raised over $80 million.
	He outspent us.
	Three to one.
	Now, some people say, you know, it's interesting, I hear sometimes, oh, come on, money doesn't matter in politics.
	Really?
	You typically hear that from people who've ever run for office because money is the tool by which you communicate, particularly when the media is all in on the other side.
	Let me give you one example of how money matters in politics.
	My campaign in 2018 had 18 full time campaign staffers.
	Beto O'Rourke's campaign had 805, 18 to 805.
	Try any other battle with that kind of mismatch in terms of resources.
	And, and what ended up happening, the Democrats increased their turnout in the state of Texas more than 100%.
	than 100%.
	1.8 million Democrats showed up in 2014, the last off cycle election, 1.8 million.
	This time around 4 million Democrats showed up.
	They increased from 1.8 million to 4 million.
	Now, thankfully, what we did is we turned out 4.2 million Republicans, and that .2 was the entire margin of victory.
	Now, how did we do that?
	Part of it was at the end, I did a barnstorming tour of the state.
	Got in a bus and we did 50 town halls and rallies in the last six weeks all over the state and, and rang the bell and said to any common sense conservatives in Texas, if you want to see low taxes, low regulations, lots of job, if you want the border secure, if you want the constitution and the bill of rights protected, show up and vote.
	I think that's exactly what we're going to see in 2020.
	Every leftist in the country is going to show up and they're going to crawl over broken glass.
	They hate Donald Trump with a white hot passion.
	You're going to see Democrats in areas you didn't know there were any Democrats.
	They're, they're going to crawl out of the woodworks, which means we've got to give everyone else a reason to show up and vote.
	And this is where the DC instincts are so dangerous.
	Because if the DC Republicans say, oh, it's a close election, let's stand for nothing.
	Let's just, just let's not do anything.
	Let's not have any fights.
	Let's avoid standing for anything.
	That's how you depress the voters.
	And that's how you lose the election.
	The way instead we win 2020 is we give people a reason to vote.
	We stand for big, bold, you know, Reagan used to say paint in bold colors, not pale pastels.
	I think that's the key to winning the election.
	So let's talk about Texas.
	Arizona, another state where we are seeing movement toward the purple.
	In Texas, obviously that's been at the top of Democrats' list.
	The reason that you were target number one is because they saw that as an indicator that they could finally turn this kind of deep red state blue.
	Do you think that Texas is moving in the direction of the blue?
	It looks right now like a lot of folks are moving into Austin, a lot of folks moving into urban areas that are much more to the left.
	The voting records tend to show more Democratic turnout.
	Is Texas in danger of turning purple?
	Absolutely.
	I think Texas is a battleground.
	And you know, there are two broad, there are a lot of different movements going on, but two broad political movements that are cross-cutting.
	One thing we're seeing in recent years is working class voters are moving right.
	That's making states like Midwestern states trend more Republican.
	What we're also seeing, however, is suburban voters, in particular suburban women, are trending left.
	That means states with big suburban populations, states like Texas, states like Georgia, states like Arizona, Are trending left.
	They're becoming more purple.
	You know, Texas, people think of Texas as a, as a rural state, you know, sort of the cowboy ethos, but we're one of the most urban and suburban states in the entire country.
	Three of the 10 biggest cities in America are in the state of Texas and four of the 11 biggest cities in Texas are in the country are in Texas.
	Uh, in Texas, between Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio, over two thirds of the voters in the state of Texas are in those, those four major metro areas.
	We have massive suburban populations.
	Basically the way the Texas voting typically works is you have the cities which have been democratic for a while, the core of the cities, and then you've had these bright red doughnuts around the cities that have been suburban Republicans.
	That's what's kept Texas solidly Republican.
	Well, what happened in twenty eighteen is those bright red doughnuts became purple as suburban voters moved heavily left.
	By the way, that's what decimated the congressional Republicans in California.
	California has a lot of suburban voters as well.
	Places like Orange County that used to be very Republican and they moved significantly to the left.
	If we're going to stay competitive, we've got to be.
	Reaching those suburban moms and making the case why these policies matter, why, why socialism and open borders, why that is bad for, for suburban moms, why that's bad for your kids, why that's bad for your future.
	The media doesn't want any of those messages to get across.
	And so that means it's our job and we've got to do it in ways that get around the gatekeepers because the gatekeepers They're not pretending to be Walter Cronkite anymore.
	They are full-on partisans.
	They will put on their hat and they will cheer for whatever leftist wins the Democratic nomination, and they will do everything they can to collate the information and to pitch a propaganda war.
	For those of us who value freedom, we've got to counteract that.
	So if you look at the Democratic field, is there anybody in the Democratic field who you find particularly scary for the general election as opposed to the other candidates?
	I think the Democrats are going to nominate someone from the far left.
	You know, right now, Joe Biden's having a moment.
	I don't think Biden will be the nominee because all of the energy, all of the passion in the Democratic Party is on the extreme left.
	I think it's likely it's probably one of four people that it that it is.
	Bernie, Kamala Harris, Beto or Elizabeth Warren.
	And maybe I'd throw Mayor Pete into that.
	He's kind of having a moment.
	He's stolen some of Beto's thunder.
	Um, I think the nominee is likely to come from, from that group because that's where the fire is.
	Um, now some on the right conservatives, when I say something like that, they go, Oh great.
	Okay.
	Those guys are so loony.
	Of course we win.
	That ain't the case at all.
	Listen, the terrifying thing is I think America is entirely capable of voting for an unabashed, wild-eyed socialist.
	We are divided.
	180,000 votes switch in 2016 and Hillary Clinton's the president.
	This country is divided on a razor's edge.
	And so that means we've got a job to do.
	You know, between those candidates, I think Bernie and Warren are the least good at hiding just how out there they are.
	I think Harris and Beto and Mayor Pete, to some extent, are better at seeming reasonable while embracing lunatic left positions.
	But whoever, whoever the Democrats nominate, I believe will be formidable because everyone left of center is showing up in 2020.
	Their base, to be honest, Their turnout tool is Donald J. Trump.
	In the race against Beto, Beto rarely mentioned my name.
	He didn't run against me.
	He ran against Donald Trump.
	In this election, that's going to turn their base out.
	Now, the good news is if we turn just center-right voters out, people who believe in common sense, That's how we win, but we've got to turn them out.
	So I want to ask you about sort of the checks and balances in the system.
	So one of the critiques of the Republican Senate particularly, and the Republican Congress more generally than the Republicans held the House, was that they were delegating too much authority to the executive branch.
	I felt for a very long time that the legislature is becoming a vestigial organ of American government.
	Everything is being done by bureaucracies and that the Senate and the Congress are deeply unwilling to take back any of the statutorily and constitutionally granted powers they were granted.
	To take an example, when it comes to trade authority, the idea of delegating one-way trade authority to the executive branch and then not being able to pull it back, or when it comes to the making of war, not pulling back any of that authority.
	What do you think about the possibility of Congress at any point in the future starting to take back some of that power?
	Look, I hope we do.
	I'm a big believer in revitalizing Article One, having Congress take the responsibility to be accountable to the people again.
	There are strong structural incentives that Congress doesn't want to do it.
	It's much easier To kick the responsibility over to the unelected regulators.
	You know, last year in 2018, I made a very hard pitch to Republican leadership.
	I made a very hard pitch to the White House that we should take up another budget reconciliation.
	Now, you recall, budget reconciliation is the procedural tool that we used in 2017 to pass the tax cut.
	The only thing that's relevant for this discussion is that budget reconciliation can't be filibustered.
	It only takes 50 votes to pass, so the Democrats can't stop it.
	And I urged we should take up a budget reconciliation in 2018, win some more victories.
	And there are four things in particular that I said we should do.
	Number one, we should build a wall.
	Fully funded.
	We could have done it with only Republican votes.
	The Democrats could not have stopped us.
	Number two, we should have made the individual tax cuts and the small business tax cuts permanent.
	Both of those are set to sunset.
	We could have made them permanent forever.
	Number three, we should have passed what I call the Obamacare consensus reforms.
	In the Senate last year, we didn't have 50 votes for a total repeal.
	Tragically, I fought hard for that, but we had 50 votes for a lot of the reforms that would have increased competition, increased, uh, choices and lowered premiums for working men and women.
	That would have been a great victory.
	And then number four, and this goes right to your question, is that I urge we should pass what's called the Reins Act.
	The REINS Act would be the most sweeping regulatory reform ever passed by Congress.
	It would say that no economic regulation can go into effect unless it receives an affirmative up-down vote from Congress.
	If its impact on the economy would be a hundred million dollars or more.
	Um, we could have done that with only Republicans.
	The Democrats would have screamed, they would have yelled, but they couldn't have stopped us.
	Now, I made that case.
	I did a long PowerPoint to all the Republican senators.
	I pitched it over and over and over again for the last six months of 18.
	I made that case directly to the president.
	I made that case to the vice president.
	I made that case to the chief of staff.
	At the end of the day, Republicans didn't do it.
	And, and, and frankly, the answer as to why was never, never very satisfying.
	It was just, no, it's too hard.
	It's not worth it.
	I don't understand why we had a golden opportunity.
	Yes, we've accomplished a lot.
	But if we had taken up those victories, it would have been truly transformational.
	And the only thing lacking was the understanding of how to do it and the willingness to actually stand and fight.
	You know, that's kind of an example.
	Of where I said the Washington instinct is, oh, we got an election.
	Let's not take on anything consequential.
	What I urged the president and Republican leadership, I said, you know what?
	Let's do this.
	Imagine if we had done this in October, October of last year, we're fully funding building a wall on the entire border.
	You've got Elizabeth Warren screaming on the Senate floor.
	You've got Bernie pulling his hair out.
	You got the media going crazy and we have the votes and get it done.
	Imagine how many Americans show up to say, my God, these people actually made a promise and they did what they said.
	We might very well, I believe, have held the house, not made Nancy Pelosi speaker, if we had taken up that fight and won that fight and gotten another victory.
	But unfortunately the, the leadership wasn't willing to do that.
	What do you fear most?
	I mean, right now, there's the possibility, as you say, a 50-50 shot that President Trump loses the presidency.
	If that happens, then Democrats have at least a decent shot at taking the Senate.
	What is the proposal that you see from the Democrats that you fear the most right now that they're pushing?
	Look, to be honest, it's all of the above.
	If Democrats win the White House, there's a very good chance they win the Senate as well.
	Um, if that happens, if they have control over both houses of Congress and the White House, I think their objective will be to try to make structural changes to make their rule perpetual.
	So what will that mean?
	That will mean a number of things.
	Number one, all right, let's start economically.
	Tax cuts immediately repeal, but we're not going back to the status quo ante.
	I think they will jack up taxes dramatically.
	Uh, particularly if they get elected on the angry howl of socialism.
	Just think for a moment, you got Democrats talking about 70% tax rate or higher.
	I think you'll see those policies pass.
	By the way, I believe if Democrats take the white house and the Senate, they will end the filibuster within a month of taking office, which means the Republican minority won't be able to stop it.
	Just the Democrats together will be able to do it.
	Um, on immigration, I think you will see a massive open borders proposal, all designed to ensure democratic control.
	So the 12, 13, 14 million people here illegally, I think Democrats will grant every one of them amnesty and try to give them citizenship as quickly as possible because they believe that that most of those people here illegally will vote, uh, democratic.
	And that's designed to ensure their control and just to underscore that.
	You know, we're sitting here in California.
	California for a long time was the heart of the Republican Party.
	California had voted in six consecutive presidential elections, Republican.
	California had given us Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
	In 1987, Congress passed the last amnesty proposal.
	Three million people here illegally granted amnesty.
	The last election California ever voted Republican was 1988, the year after that amnesty proposal.
	It has gone Democrat every year since then.
	The Democrats take control.
	They will endeavor to do that in the whole country so that no Republican can win again.
	I also think there is a very good possibility.
	That they vote to stack the Supreme Court.
	So, you know, one of the areas where we're very grateful for the victories we've had has been strong constitutionalist judges on the court.
	You're seeing Democrats right now embracing, um, expanding the court from nine to 15.
	If they had six Supreme Court justices immediately, you would see a radical left wing court and, and, and all of that.
	Look, one of the problems, the left, They're all in.
	They believe in this crazy stuff.
	You know, Bernie and Kamala Harris were talking, what, a few weeks ago about the need to give every convicted murderer the right to vote.
	Now, let me ask you, Ben, who in their right mind looks at the United States of America and said, you know what our democratic process needs?
	Charles Manson's voting.
	Like, like that is bat crap crazy.
	But they're all in on this.
	The problem when Republicans, when we have unified control, you know, you know, we're sort of like, like, like Thurston Howell.
	Oh my goodness, we wouldn't want to do anything like that.
	No, no, no.
	We're in a cricket match.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	We need to have the same focus, the same zealotry for freedom that the left has for government.
	That's the fundamental fight.
	And, and, and I think if they take control, particularly if they get the Senate too, it is unbelievably dangerous.
	In a second, I want to ask you a final question, which is I need to get your take on the Game of Thrones finale, because I know that you're watching.
	But if you actually want to hear Senator Cruz's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	Subscribe.
	Head on over to dailywire.com.
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	You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Senator Cruz, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Good to see you, sir.
	Good to see you.
	Good to see you.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer, Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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