Ted Cruz has won in Iowa. How happy should I be? How significant is it? Will he really abolish the IRS and “do away with the departments of energy, commerce, education, and housing and urban development.” For all those things I could forgive him an awful lot of anything else I might disagree with him about, and many other issues become non-issues anyway, given a strong enough economy.
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42 comments to Ted Cruz wins in Iowa |
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Cautiously happy. No more.
The blathering gorilla has been given a little bit of a bloody nose. My sense of him is that he will not do well as a second-place runner.
Cruz has some good points, and of course he is only about 1,000 times better that Clinton – but that’s not setting a very high bar, is it?
llater,
llamas
Iowa has a habit of picking the Republican loser, although the record-breaking Republican turnout might indicate that habit is temporarily broken. Wait until NH votes.
Remember when Howard Dean looked unstoppable?
Plenty of candidates have based quixotic campaigns based on a “this time is different” assessment of social media. They look unstoppable like winter ice, and are equally gone by the time the primaries are over.
Ted Cruz went around IOWA opposing the government ethanol “mandate” – that should tell people what sort of person he is.
As for his proposal to get rid (as a first step) of 5 Federal Government Departments and 25 Federal Government Agencies – perhaps he would not achieve this, but at least he would try.
Marco Fox News Rubio would not try – he thinks that taxes and government spending were about right under “Compassionate Conservative” President Bush.
I do not agree with Senator Rubio on this matter – indeed I think that if the West (not just the United States) carries on with such “compassionate” policies our civilisation will collapse.
Howard Dean lost in Iowa.
As for Senator Cruz, the real test for him will be in South Carolina – whether he can beat Donald Juan Peron Trump there.
Senator Marco Fox News and Donald Trump will now tear each other apart in the snows of New Hampshire.
One last point – never argue about the Constitution of the United States with one of the greatest Constitutional lawyers of his generation. Which is what Ted Cruz is – he represented Texas before the Supreme Court many times.
Natural born means exactly what it says – literally. It means not adopted and not naturalised – but physically born to a American citizen.
Otherwise John McCain (born in Panama) could not have run in 2008 and George Romney (born in Mexico) could not have run in 1968.
Arguing Constitutional law against Ted Cruz is like arguing against Ludwig Von Mises on economics.
It is not going to go well for the person attacking them.
Cruz has guts and candidates with gits have not done too well in recent years, but I hope this time it will be different.
Anyway Fluffy Lost and that is sweet sweet news.
As always, there seems to be too much attributed to the functions of the Presidency – such as abolishing the IRS.
Even Reagan, with his inroads into the legislators could not rid the U S of a Dept. of Education.
What really happened in Iowa was that no one [R] got a majority of committed (first vote) delegates to the convention. In fact none got even a third.
The “Media” has made more of all this than it actually portends; probably because it has been “slow news days” except for events and developments which the bulk of them avoid as they impair the perceptions that same “Media” has promoted over the past 8 years.
Spring will be soon enough !
The most significant thing at this point may be that between Trump and Cruz, 52% of the votes were for the anti-establishment candidates. We’ll have to wait a while to see how significant that is.
Posted too soon: I should have added that 50% of the Democratic votes were anti-establishment, too.
The president can propose but the congress disposes. A President Cruz could propose doing away with all those agencies and departments and I’d be writing letters daily to my representatives in support but I find it problematic whether he could muster the necessary support to actually get this done.
Plan B would be to put forth a budget with massive cuts for those agencies, forcing layoffs and scope reductions. This would be more likely to get through but leaves a lot of the scope selection to the agencies. The stuff we hate the most would no doubt be the last thing given up.
Observation: Had Bush dropped out last week and thrown his support to Rubio, Trump would have finished 3rd. Large egos in play here.
Do you really need to ask if a new president would “abolish the IRS and do away with the departments of energy, commerce, education, and housing and urban development”? I feel safe saying that would be impossible. Any president who seriously tried to bite off that much would find the chewing of it completely out of the question, and the effort involved would necessarily prevent said president from working on many, many other more achievable tasks.
Reducing budgets and scopes of authority, however, might be possible. At this point I’d be happy with any president who could merely eliminate the most egregious bureaucratic power grabs: Pick just one example of regulatory tyranny from each agency and eliminate it.
Did anyone but me notice that Rand Paul beat Bush 5 to 3? Granted that Paul came in 5th still that is better than Bush who came in 6th.
Who HERE believes that the members of the United States Congress want to take back the responsibilities that Congress has transferred to the Federal Administrative State?
Supposing Cruz makes it to the General Election, I expect the election will devolve to the Right-to-Life/Choose chasm. No matter what else is good/bad about a candidate, it’s the 3rd rail of American politics, as much or more so than Social Security.
RRS and others.
All a President has to do is be “Obama in reverse”.
Mr Obama threatens to veto anything that does not contain what he wants – and he means it.
Ronald Reagan wanted to get along with with people – Mr Obama does not care if his foes hate him (he secretly loves this).
Mr Cruz is Mr Obama in reverse – he also welcomes the hatred of his enemies and is prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve victory.
I know this sort of person rather well.
What matters is what-side-are-they-on.
Bigger or smaller government.
Ronald Reagan was a nice guy.
Nice guys are not much use for serous things.
RRS at 3:33 PM is exactly right (no surprise there). There’s less to the Iowa results (on the Republican side) than the pundits would have you believe. (They have to talk about something, after all.) On the Democratic side, however, this is a serious blow to Hillary. NH will be important, and SC will be telling. (BTW, the R and D primaries in SC are on different dates: the 20th and 27th, respectively.)
The commenters here are certainly correct that a President Cruz couldn’t just “abolish the IRS” or any other federal agency; they were all created by statute and would have to be abolished in the same way. Cruz could push for that, and perhaps pick off a few one by one, and propose budget cuts, restructurings, appoint agency heads who share his vision, etc., but at best it will be slow, incremental process. But one thing he could (and has promised to) do solely on his own initiative is rescind all those illegal Executive Orders Obama has foisted on us. That’s not nothing; far from it. Judicial appointments are important too, and are mostly under the President’s control. That’s not only Supreme Court justices; it’s all Article 3 judges in the federal system. In the long run, that can form the most lasting part of any president’s legacy.
Will he really abolish the IRS and “do away with the departments of energy, commerce, education, and housing and urban development.
I’ll be happy if he at least doesn’t expand the government, like all the other presidents/candidates. Cruz has promised to overturn all of Obama’s executive orders his first day in office.
Who is he kidding. It’ll probably take him at least a month just to read all of Obama’s EOs.
Laird:
This time it will be very important in the short run as well.
Cruz’ clerkships for Chief Justice Rehnquist and with the 4th Circuit might be his greatest asset if he becomes President.
When did Paul Rand change his ame to Ted Cruz? And how come no-one noticed?
Paul Marks
You might like this:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/02/watch-ted-cruz-confronts-angry-iowa-farmer
Cheers
The commenters here are certainly correct that a President Cruz couldn’t just “abolish the IRS” or any other federal agency; they were all created by statute and would have to be abolished in the same way
Or by the supreme court. Say Ginsburg, Sotomayor or Kagan had a fatal accident. Better still say they *all* had a fatal accident. (Or were impeached*. Same either way). Cruz appoints three Constitutional justices: Roy Moore, David Bernstein, and Troy Newman. And then all the unconstitutional crap just.. goes away overnight.
* you say they’d never be impeached? The President can detail Senators for , say, Treason or Sedition. The Constitution requires 2/3rds of Senators Present to impeach (or to expel their own members). A President keen to restore the Constitution could just detain all D’RAT senators appointed by GOP governors, expel those senators, then impeach the justices. Problem solved.
AngryT — 3rd sentence — Not J. Thomas, please. We like J. Thomas. Please let us keep J. Thomas.
Ok, so he can’t do half the things he wants to do. I still think it would be excellent news if somebody who talked about wanting to do those things became president.
I know I liked it – thanks for that.
Nobody is perfect – far from it. But I do think that Cruz is the only serious candidate on the side of freedom and sanity in decades.
Julia
“C. Thomas”?
Cheers
Agreed Alisa.
But the establishment are working 24 hours a day to destroy him.
There was another contest in Iowa, and were it Middle Earth, one of the candidates might have been Shelob.
I suppose that leaves the realistic alternative for that contest as Bernie the Balrog.
Mr Ed, I don’t see Bernie as Balrog, more as Gollum.
Laird – nag, Déagol.
We like J. Thomas. Please let us keep J. Thomas.
yeah but say you could swap C. Thomas with C. Bundy?
Laird,
You might change your mind if he sets the Feds on you, but surely that’s O’Malley or Blago if we are goingto ‘cast’?
Examples of the Fox News coverage after Marco Rubio came THIRD in Iowa.
“Rubio surging” and “After Iowa all momentum is clearly with Rubio”.
I thought this propaganda would stop after awhile (as the complaints came in) – but it has just continued, 24 hour hours a day.
I do not see how Ted Cruz (with no television stations in his corner) can possible survive the constant disinformation and agtiprop from Fox News.
Still at least this campaign has opened my eyes to what Fox News really is.
The scales have fallen from my vision.
The future of the United States?
I do not see how it can survive – with the endless government spending and all Republican national candidates having to be Fox News approved.
So roll on an independent Republic of Texas – in alliance with other States for defence (against China and other threats).
One has to hope for something – and the election campaign appears to be hopeless.
Thanks to Fox News.
I have continued to watch the campaign.
Now that Rand Paul is out, no candidate has proposed any real reductions in the size and scope of government – accept one candidate.
The one candidate who is proposing real reductions in the size and scope of government is Ted Cruz.
Government must be scaled back on Civil Society (civilization) will continue to decline – indeed the decline will get much worse.
And the Republican establishment have sabotaged the only candidate who was proposing really scaling back the size and scope of the Federal government.
The Republican Establishment has been shooting itself in the hindquarters (would that it were only the foot!) for decades. Why should 2016 be any different.
But I’ll say again what I said in the other discussion: I’ll vote for Sen. Cruz, because at the very least he talks the best talk, and he has stood against the right things at least some of the time.
He’s surely a better bet than Trump and Rubio, and they’re the only other possibles as far as I can see. What would you think of Cruz/Fiorina?
J.M. Heinrichs, if you’re still reading this — No, J. Thomas. Justice Thomas.
Yes, that would be Justice Clarence Thomas. :>)
Shelob. Oh, you mean Moobelle! Just so. Bernie as Gollum? Not sure.
But Sauron has got a whole herd of wannabe Ringwraiths doing business in the Beltway for sure. (I include the Clintons in this. And certain persons from Chicago. And others still. They are all in the same herd.)
Meanwhile, Ron Paul says Bernie is “almost libertarian” on some issues. Oh? like what? –Why, like getting us out of these incessant wars and bringing ALL the troops home.
I don’t know. I’m mad at Randy Barnett, but it’s not because he’s “not libertarian enough.”
TRUMP™ will use the nukes to “Make America Great Again”.
Something that has been needed since about 1950.
Fix that and most of the rest will follow
Let me guess, he will not allow fiat currency for inmates in his GULAG?
Sigh. Something like that I’m afraid, Mr Ed.
That was exactly my thinking. Alas, I am not optimistic the way things have been going so far.
Ron Paul has never been very bright, and he has not gotten any better with time.
What Rob Fisher said, thus:
“Ok, so he can’t do half the things he wants to do. I still think it would be excellent news if somebody who talked about wanting to do those things became president.”
Me too.
I am always puzzled when people like us, who trade almost entirely only in words and hopes, say that words and hopes don’t count for anything.