On Wednesday, Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro had the opportunity to speak at length with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Here is a transcript of their conversation, which spanned topics including a recent hearing on college campus free speech crackdowns to the negotiations over Trumpcare.
SHAPIRO: What was the point of having this hearing on free speech on college campuses?
CRUZ: To highlight the assault on free speech that is occurring on a daily basis on college campuses. The universities used to be a place where the vigorous contest of ideas was welcomed, where young people went to have their ideas challenged, to encounter new ideas, and to learn what they believe.
More and more, today’s universities are becoming left-wing indoctrination centers where leftists and the faculty and the administration seek to use brute force to silence any views that counter their prevailing political view. Ben, you have courageously gone to numerous liberal campuses and encountered faculty and protesters and administrators quite eager to muzzle you. I think you should wear that as a badge of honor, because what they’re saying is that they’re afraid. They’re afraid that their ideas, their political philosophy, their worldview can’t stand scrutiny, cannot stand up to the dialectic of being challenged with facts and substance and what actually works in reality and that the only way they can hope to keep young impressionable minds believing what they’re selling is to try to silence any views to the contrary. Every time a campus silences you, the administrators and faculty are telling you they are afraid of the force of argument and facts and logic behind the very reasonable positions you’re espousing.
SHAPIRO: Do you think legislation is necessary in order to protect the First Amendment on campuses?
CRUZ: It’s not clear at this point. The main purpose of the hearing yesterday was to shine a spotlight on what’s happening. I’m a big believer that truth is the best disinfectant, and this sort of small-minded tyranny flourishes in darkness and out of sight. I hope that the hearing helped draw attention to the profoundly illiberal policies being enforced by far too many college and university faculties.
We did hear testimony from one of the witnesses, Professor Eugene Volokh, an old friend and extremely highly regarded First Amendment scholar, about how some of the anti-speech policies at universities were pushed by misinterpretations of federal law, particularly Title VII and Title IX, by which the Obama administration pressured and even coerced universities to forcibly silence disfavored political views through threats of federal action. To the extent that’s the case, that needs to be corrected by Congress or the administration or both. That merits more careful, further study.
There’s certainly precedent for using the vast number of federal dollars flowing to schools as a vehicle to protect the rights of students. Previous Congresses, for example, have passed the Solomon Amendment, that would cut off federal funding to universities that banned ROTC from campus; when I was solicitor general of TX, I led a coalition of states defending that amendment from constitutional challenge at the Supreme Court, and we prevailed. You had leftists who wanted to exclude military recruiters, and as a result, they were depriving not only their students of an opportunity to pursue a career in the military, but they were denying our military services access to talented young people. Congress could consider something similar in this regard. It’s premature for legislative action right now; we need to discuss it further and examine it more closely, but it is absolutely clear now that the policies of censorship and campus totalitarianism need to end.
SHAPIRO: Senator Feinstein said at the hearing, “I do believe that the university has a right to protect its students from demonstrations once they become acts of violence.” She came out in favor of a heckler’s veto. What do you make of her argument?
CRUZ: The success of the heckler’s veto is the direct result of the political bias and agenda of the administrators. If students riot and commit acts of violence, they should be expelled — and we have seen acts of violence carried out. We saw when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury, we saw violent protests. We saw violent protests at Berkeley, and the administrators are far too quick to gloss over and exonerate students who are behaving as violent criminals. If you commit acts of violence, you should be prosecuted and universities should expel you. You have every right to speak, but you don’t have a right to commit acts of violence. When administrators cancel speakers because students threaten violence, that ensures they will continue to threaten violence. It’s Pavlovian training: violent thuggery works, please do more of it.
Nobody believes for a second if right-wing students were protesting a leftist – if President Obama was coming to campus and right-wing students said they would have a violent protest — is there a university in the country that would do anything but prevent the violent protest and expel any student that tried? You wouldn’t have to have President Obama. You could have any of a thousand college leftists who are embraced and lionized and they would not for a minute approve a heckler’s veto from the right. And by the way, nobody from the right should use a heckler’s veto. But this is a problem that has arisen heavily from the fever swamps of the far left, where power and might justify silencing all dissent, and it’s the same spirit behind totalitarianism.
Conservatives respect individuals. And individuals have the right to free speech, to free exercise of religion, to free association — and in the marketplace of ideas, the better ideas prevail. You and I both attended academic institutions that are heavily liberal, and we certainly had Marxist professors, and I was glad of it. It was helpful. I disagree profoundly with Marxism; I think it’s one of the most evil doctrines ever promulgated on the face of the earth. It’s led to the murder of millions and the suffering of billions. My own family has been imprisoned and tortured – my aunt was imprisoned and tortured by Castro’s goons. But listening to people who espouse those ideas and learning from them is valuable — learning how to effectively argue against pernicious ideas.
SHAPIRO: What do you make of protesters rushing the stage at the Shakespeare in the Park performance of “Julius Caesar”?
CRUZ: I embrace everyone’s right to free speech, but I think disrupting a play is not the same thing. There are lots of plays that are foolish, that are offensive, that are politically biased, but I don’t think you have a right to shut down a dramatic presentation whether you agree with it or not. You have a right to speak about what’s wrong about it, but shutting it down crosses a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
SHAPIRO: To change topics, have you been involved in the Obamacare replacement negotiations?
CRUZ: Yes, and let’s flesh it out a couple of levels. Starting back several months ago, I worked to bring together a working group of six senators to try to come together on repealing Obamacare. That group was myself, Lamar Alexander, Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, and Corey Gardner. That group spans the full ideological spectrum in the Senate. We began meeting every week in my conference room, trying to come together and get on the same page. If those six could get on the same page, that would likely be a bill that could command the support of a majority of the conference. I think those conversations were productive. One of the best signs of those conversations being productive was that not a single story leaked to the press. That’s highly unusual and a sign that everyone was trying in good faith to get to a solution.
When it became clear that the House was going to pass a bill, Lamar Alexander and I went to Mitch McConnell and said we needed a process to get people together and get things done in the Senate. We took the working group and expanded it to include other members of the leadership, and that became the larger working group meeting twice a week for a couple of months.
Those discussions have been productive, very detailed, in good faith. I think there’s an agreement to be reached. We can get this done. What I think is most critical is we honor our promise to repeal Obamacare, and that we lower premiums. The reason people are unhappy is skyrocketing premiums, and millions can’t afford health insurance anymore. We need to fix that problem.
Discussions have been quite good. At this stage, however, Mitch McConnell and his office have the pen and are drafting the actual legislation. I don’t know what’s in it. Mike Lee doesn’t know what’s in it. Both of us are frustrated that we don’t know what’s in it, after spending the last five months working to come together. We’re supposed to see bill text tomorrow. I hope it reflects the positive reform ideas we’ve been working on the last five months. I hope it is a consensus product. If it’s not, if the conservative ideas that have been offered in good faith are not reflected in the bill, if there are not reforms designed to drive down the cost of premiums, the bill isn’t going to pass. But I don’t want to be premature. I think we should wait and see what the draft is.
SHAPIRO: If the Senate rubber stamped the House bill, would you support it, given that the House bill didn’t actually repeal Obamacare in many crucial ways?
CRUZ: The first version of the House bill was very problematic and there were many issues with it – first and foremost, that it didn’t do nearly enough to drive down premiums. I think the House Freedom Caucus improved the bill significantly. They focused quite rightly on the need to drive down premiums. The Senate needs to go much further than the House Bill. We need to improve it significantly more. I don’t know if the Senate will do so or not. It is what I have been working day and night, practically every waking hour for he last five months to do: bring senators together to get that done.
SHAPIRO: Are you worried that Republicans will pass a bill that doesn’t repeal Obamacare, declare victory, then watch as premiums skyrocket and the free market is blamed for what is essentially a continuation of a heavily government-regulated Obamacare system?
CRUZ: There are two bad outcomes that are possible. One bad outcome is that we fail to repeal Obamacare – we fail to pass any bill at all. For the past seven years we’ve campaigned promising the voter that we would repeal the disaster that is Obamacare, that has cost millions of Americans their jobs, thrown them into part-time jobs, cost them their doctors, caused premiums to skyrocket. If we fail to deliver after being given every branch of government, that’s profoundly harmful both as a substantive matter of policy but also as a political matter. The credibility of Republicans would be deeply, deeply undermined.
There’s a second outcome that’s even worse than that. We pass a bill titled “Obamacare Repeal,” but doesn’t in fact repeal Obamacare — in fact expands it. We hold a press conference patting ourselves on the back, claiming to have repealed it. And then next year, premiums continue to skyrocket and it’s demonstrated that what Republicans said isn’t true. I think that has even greater policy harms and political harms. So I’m trying to avoid both of those. I’m trying to get Republicans in the Senate and the House and the President and the Vice President to do what we said we would do. That’s what I’m urging all the players to do.
SHAPIRO: Finally, should Congress require an AUMF for action in Syria?
CRUZ: There is no doubt that to engage in ongoing military conflict, the Constitution requires that Congress authorize the use of military force. Under the Constitution the president is the commander-in-chief, the president has the authority to respond to exigent circumstances and imminent threats to national security. But for continuous and ongoing military action, a declaration or war or at minimum an AUMF is required. I have consistently called on both President Obama and President Trump to seek that authorization before engaging in ongoing hostilities and conflict.
With regard to ISIS, there are existing AUMFs for targeting radical Islamic terrorists, and I think that is appropriate to target an avowed enemy of the United States attempting to murder innocent Americans, and we should be using the full military might to defeat and destroy ISIS. But if the objective shifts to toppling the Syrian regime and engaging in what I fear would be a risky and even foolhardy approach of allowing Syria and its potential stockpile of chemical weapons to fall into the hands of ISIS and al Qaeda and al Nusra, that poses profound risks to our national security and merits a serious debate. One of the reasons Congress has the authority under the Constitution is so that commander-in-chief has to lay out the objective and seek authorization from the people’s elected representatives to go forward. That Constitutional rule applies to presidents where Democrat or Republican.