Fort Worth Inc.
Texas’ junior member of the United States Senate stopped by the Fort Worth Club on Wednesday morning for a visit with civic leaders in a meeting hosted by the Fort Worth Chamber.
“My No. 1 priority in the Senate is jobs,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Houston) said. “It is focused like a laser on jobs, jobs, jobs. For one very simply reason: That’s the top priority of Texans. If you travel the state, it doesn’t matter what region of the state you're in. You can be in East Texas or West Texas. You can be in the Panhandle or all the way down to the Valley, Texans want jobs, we want more jobs, we want higher wages, we want greater opportunity for our kids.”
The meeting with the senator, which included a short address and a Q&A session, focused on job creation and growth in a booming Texas economy, education, regulation, and taxes and their impact on the “dynamism of the free enterprise system.”
Cruz also discussed the importance of small businesses, vocational training, and school choice, and added that bipartisan opportunities for economic development existed within the Senate chambers. The senator also expressed concerns about government spending and debt reduction.
“You look at the Texas miracle and it's not by accident because what I also know is that it's not a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington that are creating jobs. The men and women who are doing it are sitting right here in the room. Jobs come when an entrepreneur puts capital to meet a need, but government is very, very good at screwing it up.
“And if you look consistently when you have high, high taxes and crushing regulations, you begin to kill jobs. Again, it’s not rocket science. Two-thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses. You want an environment where small businesses are growing and prospering where they're innovating where they're taking on entrenched interests.”
Fort Worth Inc.
Cruz, elected to the seat held by Kay Bailey Hutchison, Lloyd Bentsen, Ralph Yarborough, Price Daniel, Tom Connally, and Charles Culberson, among others, will face voters in 18 months in a bid for a third term. His reelection in 2018 was too close for his comfort, made all the more so by Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s edging Cruz by the smallest of margins in Tarrant County.
In making his meteoric rise in 2018, O’Rourke, a former U.S. Congressman, outraised Cruz by $33 million, much of it sourced out of state, and an ambitious grassroots organization that included the Democrat visiting each of Texas’ 254 counties. O’Rourke was also able to capitalize on Cruz’s reputation as unlikable and polarizing.
Since then, O’Rourke has made failed bids for president and governor. To date, he has given no hint of a second run at Cruz.
U.S. Rep. Collin Allred (D-Dallas) reportedly is considering a run for Cruz’s seat, according to the Dallas Morning News.
In a gathering with reporters afterward on Wednesday in Fort Worth, Cruz expressed his belief that the indictment of Donald Trump was politically motivated and spoke about the need for the legislation he helped introduce to improve background checks on gun ownership that targets felons, fugitives, and those with severe mental illness.
“The indictment of Donald Trump was political, it was an abuse of power, it was baseless,” Cruz said. “It was frivolous.”
Cruz described the alleged crime as “designed entirely by a left-wing Democrat district attorney who was elected with over $1 million from George Soros to try to attack his political rivals. Listen, if you don't like Donald Trump, the answer is to try to beat him at the ballot box. The answer is to trust democracy. What we're seeing Democrats do is to try to use law enforcement to target their enemies because they don't trust the voters.”
Cruz predicted that the case would be thrown out.
“It is a dark day when you have a partisan Democrat district attorney, Alvin Bragg, run as a candidate promising “to get Trump.” That's not the job of the D.A, to be a partisan attack dog. Sadly, that's what we saw.”
Asked if the former president’s dalliance with a porn actress was perhaps more importantly an indictment of character, Cruz said that’s a “question for the voters to decide.”
Cruz also said the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have been avoided had President Biden not waived sanctions, outlined in a bill he wrote, on the owner of Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that would allow Russia to export billions of dollars' worth of natural gas while bypassing Ukraine.