With Ted Cruz, Texas' former solicitor general, on track to win a U.S. Senate seat in three months, the far-right Republican is starting to receive some attention from the national media. The New York Times, for example, has a feature on Cruz this morning, emphasizing his "intellectual heft."
The piece quotes a former Cruz professor saying the candidate stood out even among his Ivy League peers as "intellectually and morally serious."
It led Isaac Chotiner to note this gem from a Gail Collins column:
In a blog posting early this year, Cruz vowed that as senator he would fight against "a dangerous United Nations plan" on environmental sustainability that he said was aimed at abolishing "golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads." He blamed all this on the Democratic financier-philanthropist George Soros.
That's clearly not encouraging, but I'd add that Cruz also authored a proposal in Texas that would allow the state to ignore a federal law it doesn't like, nullifying the Affordable Care Act by partnering up with another state that felt the same way. This stems from a crackpot legal theory that was resolved by the Civil War.
"Intellectually and morally serious"? I'm afraid not.