Ted Cruz, Jeff Sessions Roll Out Antidote To Broken H-1B Program: American Jobs First Act

Sens. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) together are promoting new legislation to reform the H-1B visa program, after scores of abuses by companies including Disney, Southern California Edison and more. --The bill, the American Jobs First Act of 2015, is essentially an antidote to the woes of the H-1B program. The bill, which represents a crackdown on immigration program abuses by special interests, has several components.

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Senator Ted Cruz Seeks To Remove Muslim Brotherhood's Veil

Imagine the existence of a group involved in covertly formulating a plan on how to subvert the U.S. Constitution, distributing that plan among its leadership and agents within the U.S., quietly supporting terrorism to further this agenda, declaring war against America, and brazenly recognizing U.S. indifference by boasting about its terrorist activities.

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Ted Cruz to Mitch McConnell: Don’t schedule legislation to fund Planned Parenthood

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is taking a lead role in a campaign to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood, will send Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a letter next week urging him not to schedule a vote on or help push legislation that gives federal money to the organization.The letter, which is in draft form and circulating around the Senate for signatures, is Cruz's first official action against the organization in the new Senate session, which starts Tuesday. It comes as McConnell said this week that Congress won't be able to stop government money from going to Planned Parenthood.

Read more at the Washington Post
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Cruz splits the apple [William Tell style]

The Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez at PJ Media makes an analogy between crack-shot William Tell and candidate Ted Cruz in a post he titled "William Cruz". He writes:

Michael Van Der Galien has tried to understand why the Ted Cruz presidential candidacy announcement has set social media on its ear and advances a tentative theory. “But why are leftists’ heads exploding as well? I’ve got no doubt I know the answer: they fear him. Tremendously even. He is everything they oppose: a true, small-government conservative.” If that were all Cruz were guilty of it wouldn’t be half bad. It’s far worse. His “Imagine” speech seemed calculated to ridicule every Leftist shibboleth with predictable effect. The Left lost no time characterizing him as a Christian bigot, a patriarchal supremacist...

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VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT: Cruz announces presidential campaign at Liberty University

See entire video and transcript on the BCRW Campaign page. Read More......

Cruz: Don't Believe 'If You Like Your Internet, You Can Keep Your Internet’

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) urged members of the public not to believe promises of “if you like your Internet, you can keep your Internet” in a speech on Thursday. ✧ Cruz declared “don’t mess with the Internet.” And asked “which has greater innovation, the United States Post Office or Facebook and Twitter? Which has greater innovation, taxi commissions in local cities or Lyft and Uber? Every time you put unelected bureaucrats in charge of a market, they stifle innovation and what they also do is they favor the big boys. If you think for a minute that the FCC is going to listen to small start-ups, than you’re ignoring the history of every other instance of regulation.”

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Ted Cruz Releases Definitive List of 76 ‘Lawless’ Obama Actions

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz released a definitive list Wednesday of 76 “lawless” Obama administration actions and abuses of power.   Cruz’s “The Legal Limit Report No. 4,” obtained by The Daily Caller, delves into little-known and little-reported details of President Obama’s executive actions. Cruz was set to discuss his report at the Federalist Society in the Promenade Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at 2:15 PM Wednesday.  “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat,” Cruz stated in the report’s introductory remarks.

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CBS Caught Censoring Cruz’s Comments On Obama’s Abuse of Power

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday morning and was met with a barrage of questions from host Bob Schieffer about his involvement in the government shutdown. Apart from being the victim of Schieffer’s accusations that the Tea Party senator was to blame for the shutdown, it also appears that Mr. Cruz was the victim of editing by CBS. ✧ Based on video from Senator Cruz’s YouTube page and what aired on the Face the Nation broadcast, the senator’s comments surrounding President Obama’s “abuse of power” were edited from the program. Instead what aired was a segment that ignored many of the senator’s complaints directed at President Obama. --See the aired and unaired videos at InfoWars... Read More......

Hume: Tea Party pushed budget stand-off because GOP 'utterly failed' to restrain bloated gov't

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume explained on "Special Report With Bret Baier" Monday night why Tea Party Republicans originally started their confrontation with Democrats over the bid to defund ObamaCare. He argued that they're taking an unconventional approach, because the mainstream GOP has "utterly failed" to stop the growth of government.

Brit Hume [excerpt]:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. ✧ And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.

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An Obama-Cruz Shutdown

Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2013
The President is refusing to compromise on anything. ✧ Washington is careening toward a partial government shutdown on Tuesday amid its usual synthetic outrage. As the partisan cries grow in volume, it's worth a few minutes to sort the truth from the nonsense. ✧ The first thing to keep in mind is that this does not mean "anarchy," in Harry Reid's typically subtle formulation, or even a complete government shutdown. Functions deemed "essential" will continue, and it's debatable how many of those really are crucial to daily American life. The military will be paid, Social Security checks will still go out. Many Americans will be inconvenienced, but tens of millions may come to realize how easily they can do without most of the vast federal Leviathan.

A second reality is that both parties are responsible for getting to this point. Americans chose a divided government in 2010 and again in 2012, electing House Republicans as a check on Democrats whose undiluted liberalism alarmed millions of voters when they ran the entire government in 2009-2010. The inability to compromise now is rooted in the wide disagreement about the role of government that now separates the two parties. We've criticized GOP Senator Ted Cruz for his strategy to make defunding ObamaCare a requirement of funding the rest of government. He and his allies know that Mr. Obama can never agree to that, and even millions of Americans who oppose ObamaCare don't agree with his shutdown ultimatum. It risks political damage for the House and Senate GOP in 2014 even as Mr. Cruz builds his email list for 2016.

Yet it takes two to tangle, and Mr. Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr. Cruz. This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can't abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that Mr. Obama says, he knows this is false. His own staff suggested the spending sequester during the 2011 debt debate, and Democratic Congresses have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican Presidents.

Mr. Obama also refuses to bend on any part of ObamaCare—except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. He also unilaterally delayed verifying the income of Americans seeking subsidies. He did this to pile more people into the ObamaCare exchanges, lest they fail, and to limit the harm to job creation before 2014.

Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that House Republicans have put in their latest government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. And he won't even accept repeal of the medical-device tax that 79 Senators, including 33 Democrats, are on record as supporting. The tax is already hurting innovation and sending jobs overseas.

Mr. Obama's refusal to negotiate suggests that he wants a shutdown—either over the budget or debt limit. His agenda is dying on Capitol Hill, because of Senate Democrats as well as House Republicans. With his approval rating down and independents leaning toward the GOP, he figures his only chance to salvage a second-term domestic legacy is to restore Nancy Pelosi as Speaker in his final two years. His best opening to make that happen is a shutdown or debt-limit crisis that he will try to blame on Republicans. A shutdown is as much his strategy as it is Mr. Cruz's.

A version of this article appeared September 30, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Obama-Cruz Shutdown. (Hat tip: Elias Sandervaal on Facebook) Read More......