John Jefferson
The notoriously verbose Ted Cruz has gone largely silent on abortion, one of his favorite topics to legislate on and bloviate about, during his Senate re-election campaign in Texas – an ominous sign both for Cruz and the anti-abortion movement writ large.
Indeed, Texas representative Colin Allred has mounted an unusually strong campaign for Cruz’s Senate seat at a time when Texas has become ground zero in the grisly maternal health disaster unfolding across the country since the fall of Roe v Wade. As of the latest University of Houston poll, the race between Cruz and Allred is currently a dead heat, with Cruz leading the former NFL player by only two points (47-45%). This is remarkable for Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat in a statewide race in three decades and has never elected a Black US senator.
Abortion is a particularly toxic issue for Republicans this presidential election cycle, so much so that even Donald Trump posted after the Democratic national convention on Friday that his administration “would be great for women and their reproductive rights”.
Cruz had openly celebrated the US supreme court overturning Roe in 2022, calling the decision a “massive victory”. But since Texas women began pouring out personal horror stories and suing the state left and right for denying them emergency abortions under the state’s draconian ban, he’s gone quiet.
The senator dodged multiple questions in December about the Texas supreme court denying 31-year-old Kate Cox’s request for an emergency abortion, which forced her to travel out of state for care after her doctor discovered a severe fetal anomaly, and has repeatedly avoided press inquiries about abortion ever since. So as Cruz tries to distance himself from the very real consequences of the abortion bans that the US supreme court unleashed, it’s important to look at exactly how influential Cruz was behind the scenes in enabling this health care disaster.
The conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, which Texas Monthly accurately described in a headline as the Rogue Court That Paved the Way for Roe’s Demise, is packed with rightwing judges who got their start in Texas politics. Arguably the most zealous anti-abortion idealog among them, Trump appointee James Ho, is an old friend of Ted Cruz’s who was heavily involved in Cruz’s 2017 Senate campaign a decade after succeeding him as Texas solicitor general.
Under the Trump administration, Cruz “basically had free rein” to fill district courts with conservative judges and reportedly urged Trump behind the scenes during that time to nominate Ho to the fifth circuit, according to the Texas Tribune. Cruz then attended his “good friend” Ho’s swearing in ceremony, and Ho went on to become the notorious appellate judge who cited a wildlife case in his argument to ban the commonly used abortion pill in 2023, writing that doctors suffer an “aesthetic injury” when they lose the ability to observe their unborn patients–much like a bird-watcher suffers if he can’t look at birds.
Cruz has also bragged about his role in getting Texans Don Willett and Andrew Oldham confirmed to the fifth circuit, touting his own role in “reshap[ing] the federal judiciary” in a 2020 press release and gushing that Willett, Oldham and Ho were “well on their way to becoming national judicial superstars”. The trio have since been described as “arguably the most transformative figures” on the court that paved the way for overturning Roe, as they greenlit laws such as Texas’s infamously cruel abortion ban, the Heartbeat Act (Senate Bill 8), and overturned lower court rulings on abortion cases that were intentionally aimed for the US supreme court.
Cruz hasn’t just been a cheerleader on the sidelines of the abortion wars; he was a key player in transforming the judiciary to pave the way for Dobbs and enable his own state to punish and essentially torture pregnant women the way they are doing now. He can avoid questions on the subject, but there’s really not much more he needs to say: the crisis in Texas already belongs to him.
This could give Allred the boost he needs to make history in Texas.
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