Cruz also on Monday addressed the candidacy of Donald Trump in his most direct terms yet.
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Abortion is the issue, according to Cruz, not contraception.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, left, and Texas Republican Sen. Yet his remarks are laced with echoes of President Barack Obama, one of the senator’s most frequent foils on the campaign trail.
“The Republican presidential contender took his defense of contraceptions a step further, indirectly providing his own family’s use as evidence, saying, “[My wife] Heidi and I, we have two little girls.
“They do so under the guise of protecting our liberties”, Rubio said. Cruz claims that the whole war against contraception was one built by Democrats in order to scare people “who are not paying a lot of attention” and gain their votes.
When asked in July about whether he would champion a budget showdown over pulling funds from Planned Parenthood, Cruz said, “I would support any and all legislative efforts to defund Planned Parenthood”.
One reason for the surge in endorsements for Rubio – including nods from Sens.
“The Republican establishment does increasingly see Rubio as perhaps their best opportunity to win”, Geoffrey Skelley, political analyst for the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told TheBlaze.
Cruz came alive: “Hillary Clinton embraces abortion on demand in all circumstances up until the moment of birth”, he told the audience in response. This has hardly endeared him to Republicans.
Donald Trump still dominates the Republican race, but Rubio and Cruz are in a dead heat for second. Cruz is suggesting Rubio bears some blame for the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans. And taking the opposite position of Hillary Clinton, on any issue, is always worthwhile politics in a GOP primary. While Cruz believes in a muscular foreign policy, he has opposed removing Assad from power – his views are more in line with those ex-hawks who have been chastened by America’s experience with war over the past decade and a half. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Susan Collins of ME and Dean Heller of Nevada.
The two senators were on opposite sides earlier this year when Congress eliminated the National Security Agency’s bulk phone-records collection program and replaced it with a more restrictive measure to keep the records in phone companies’ hands.
“I stand strongly on behalf of the ability of this government to gather intelligence on our adversaries and our enemies, especially terrorists, but also other nation states”. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Fox News. “That is a profound threat to national security”, Cruz said. That’s just part of the record.
Both Christie and Rubio argued that Erdogan has a right to shoot down fighters that stray into his air space. When baited by a debate moderator to attack Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria, Trump instead said he’d get along fine with the Russian. But he said from his own observations, Trump doesn’t have the same ground game in Iowa as Cruz or even Kentucky Sen.
The Texan portrayed himself as a third way between the stalwart, non-interventionist views of Senator Rand Paul and pro-interventionist policies in pursuit of spreading democracy and human rights through the Middle East that Rubio espouses.
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Despite momentum for any candidate, Trump is still leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Skelley pointed out.
