Senator Ted Cruz | The All-In Inauguration Series

0:04Hey everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. We're here at the inauguration of our 47th president, Donald J. Trump, and we have a very special guest joining us on our coverage, Senator Ted Cruz, from the great state, now my great state of Texas. Welcome to the All In podcast. And welcome to Texas. It's pretty great. Where'd you get the boots? Any chance I can get a recommendation here? So that's easy. These are look as he look as he the factory is in El Paso their handmade there. They're beautiful Okay, and and these particular boots the front of them have the Senate seal on them. Oh, that's strong And the back of that's really great have the come and take it flag Whoa, which I don't know do you know the history of the come and take it?

0:49I was about to ask you okay since you're new Texan. This is important. He started saying y 'all so he's adapting but he needs to learn Y 'all gotta start giving me a hard time about that. All right, so Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, we were part of Mexico. And the dictator of Mexico was General Santa Ana. And there's a little town in South Texas called the town of Gonzales. And then General Ana sent an order to the Texians, which is what we were called back to, the Texians, to hand over their guns. And there was a cannon that guarded the city. And General Santa Ana said, hand over the cannon. And the Texians responded by making a flag with an image of the cannon and underneath that the legend come and take it.

1:33Wow. And they flew it over the town and that was the beginning of the Texas Revolution. Now the epilogue is Santa Ana came in with about 6 ,000 soldiers and he did in fact take the cannon. I mean Gonzalez was a tiny little town and the Texas Revolution was very much like the American Revolution. We lost every damn battle. The Alamo was a slaughter, Golyad was a slaughter, much like Washington, where every battle he lost and lost and lost. And then at San Jacinto we won, defeated Santa Ana, General Sam Houston. And we became our own nation, the Republic of Texas, from 1836 to 1845. It says something about resilience, he doesn't?

2:08It does. Let me ask you a question. Having lived in New York and grown up there, and then done 20 years in California now, my second year in Texas or starting my second year. It's amazing to me that you're allowed to build things in Texas, like homes or factories. And the price of homes has gone down two years in a row. And then the other two places I live, the price of homes go up every year, 10, 20%. And then you don't have state taxes. How is all this possible when you look at it just from first principles? How are you able to accomplish so much development in Texas? When in California, the Nimbism, like literally if you want to build.

2:52Yeah, that's a great question. A cancer word for children, they'll stop you because it throws shade on a protected species of flour. So California used to know the answer to this. Fifty years ago, California was the economic engine of the country. And unfortunately, you're cursed by idiot politicians who were destroying this mighty economic engine. You know, none of this is rocket science. In Texas, we believe in freedom. We believe in low taxes and low regulations. And to understand the state, Texas was basically founded by a bunch of wildcatters who were guys with fourth grade educations that began drilling holes in the ground.

3:32And one after the other became the richest men on earth. And the ethos of Texas, you know, it was interesting, a number of years ago, I was visiting with a CEO and an executive team of a company that had moved from California to Texas. And they didn't have any Texas ties, but they were just fed up with California. They moved to Texas, and so I was asking them, they don't have only been in Texas for a couple of months. I said, all right, what's the biggest difference? And I thought maybe they'd say Texas or maybe regulations or maybe lawsuits. Those were the three things I was going to guess. Their answer blew me away.

4:05They said the biggest difference is the culture. And what they said is in California, if you're in business, you're a pariah. They said, look, there's an exception for tech and an exception for Hollywood. If you're not in it more. Well, that was their view, but they were not in tech or Hollywood. They were in sanitation, which was not a sexy business. And the way they described it, they said, if you're at a party and someone asks, what do you do when you say I'm a businessman? They said, people, turn around and walk away. And I gotta say as a Texan, that is weird. I mean, we lionize entrepreneurs.

4:38California was a pioneering state. The gold rush, what happened? Because it's always easy to blame idiot politicians, but in a democracy, those politicians are elected by the voters. So something, where did the voters go that caused this change in that state compared to where the voters went in Texas? When they both came from, and all of America, all the United States, all the states of the Republic came from a pioneering origin. Well, there is a cause and effect, and you go back to 1987, and 1987 is when Ronald Reagan signed Amnesty in the place. And at the time, there were three million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

5:18And Congress went to the American people and said, all right, we got a deal for you. We're going to secure the border. We're going to fix the problem of illegal immigration forever. And in exchange, we're going to give Amnesty to the three million people who are here legally now. And in 87 the American people said, okay, that sounds like a reasonable deal, they took the deal. Now we now know what happened, which is the amnesty happened, but the border never got secured. What did that mean for California? The highest concentration of illegal immigrants was in California. In 1988, California voted Republican in the presidential race as it had for six consecutive years, six consecutive cycles previously.

5:591988 was the last year California ever went Republican. Both the shorts and egg are for president. Oh, for president. In the presidential race. And so I think the Amnesty Law played a significant part, the federal law changing the voting composition of the state. Yeah. And then, and look, you guys would know the state politics more, but it also seemed to me that you have the public employee unions in California that realize that they could vote themselves more and more of the large S and feel on the politicians. You don't have a failure of democracy, right? And it - So Jason brought up a really important question to kick this off.

6:37I just want to give you a chance to maybe expand on it, which is there are so many examples Texas is one. You can look abroad, the UAE as an example is another, where there's a high degree of quality of infrastructure and, you know, civility, social services, education, security, but you don't have the traditional taxation. And so how is Texas able to actually keep the $322 billion budget is just completely falling apart. How, what is, what, what happens? Because you then see everything at the federal level, but when you go back to your state, you see, hey, we don't have, and your real estate taxes aren't that much higher, are they in California?

7:29The real estate taxes are a little bit higher, but we have no income tax. So it more, or they're makes up for it. Yeah, yeah, that's the first and one and a half to pay. That's the principal avenue of taxation. You got real estate taxes and sales taxes or where the state and local governments get their taxes. But no income tax. Look, some of it is, government does less. I mean, there's a philosophy that government doesn't have to spend and provide everything government does police and firefighters and roads and does the basic responsibilities of government. But it's not engaged in funding every pet project of every politician.

8:05That's part of it. You know, you look at across the country, I mean, it is not a complicated migration pattern. That people are fleeing bright blue states with high taxes and high regulations. And they are coming to red states with low taxes and low regulations. Any safety. So we've had, it has now been more than a decade that we have had over a thousand people a day moving to Texas. So when I was first elected 13 years ago, we had 26 million Texans. Today we have over 31 million Texans. So we've added 5 million Texans in 13 years. And the biggest state folks come from is California. It's interesting the migration pattern.

8:49You get a lot of California to Texas. New Yorkers tend to go to Florida more. We get some New Yorkers, but for whatever reason, West Coast folks seem to prefer Texas, and East Coast folks seem to prefer Florida. But I actually think the competition in terms of where we lose people too. We lose people either to Florida or Tennessee. Those are about the only two places if someone's thinking of leaving. And I love that competition. I want Florida and Tennessee to be out fighting and saying we can create an even better environment for small businesses and jobs. And part of it is the number one reason people come to Texas is Texas where the jobs are.

9:26And you want an environment where you have small businesses that are doing great, but people also want to be safe. And so, you look at things like defunding the police or sorrows prosecutors that let murderers go. Yep. And that gives people a pretty acute incentive to get the heck out. We were involved in the recall of Chesa Boudin, our podcast, and David Sacks, our compatriot who couldn't make it. He's busy working with you guys. Yep. But yeah, this crime issue seems, people have seemed to lost, They seem to have lost the script on who the state is working for, the taxpayers or the criminals.

10:05In Texas, it's just extraordinary that you've figured out that you could prioritize the people not committing crime and not cater to the people committing crime. I'm saying this in the most facetious way possible, but it's just common sense. I think it feels to me like Californians have had enough and it's just going to take a decade or two to unwind it. But let's double click on immigration since the great state of Texas has to deal with this more than anybody. But this is a land of immigrants. We are all immigrants on this land. And so that's our tradition. In fact, you're sitting next to two extraordinary immigrants, my besties, Jamal, and Freiburg.

10:42What do you believe at this point in time? Is America for the Americans or here? Would you believe we should be getting the best and brightest to come to this country? Look, absolutely both. I have for a long time described my immigration views in four words. Legal, good, illegal bad. Okay. I think most Americans, most Texans agree with that. And most immigrants. Look, there's a right way to come to this country. There's the way you came to this country. There's the way my dad came to this country. My dad was born in Cuba. He grew up in Cuba. He fought in the Cuban Revolution. When he was a teenager, he fought, was thrown in prison.

11:18and he was tortured when he was 17 years old. And he came to Texas in 1957. He was 18, couldn't speak English. Had $100 in his underwear and he washed dishes making 50 cents an hour. But he came legally because he had applied to the University of Texas. He'd gotten to, and he came on a student visa. And he was an 18 year old freshman. And he started going to school here, and he came legally and he worked. And got a job and went on in time to start a small business and worked for him. You see your success, is he still with us? He is, my dad is 85. Oh my God, what a dream for him. He is my hero, it is.

11:53He's an incredible, I will say, when you have lost freedom, it's personal to you. You know, people ask sometimes, you know, why do you do politics? And I grew up as a kid, I would sit on the floor, along with my cousin, BB, with my dad and BB's mom, my Thesonia. And she also, she was also in prison in Torture and Cuba. And we would sit and listen to them tell stories. And all I ever wanted to do from when I was three, four, five years old was be a freedom fighter. I mean, it's inspiring because what they said and still say, and they're both still going strong, is look, if the only thing that prevents us from tyranny is having good people in office who will fight for our freedoms.

12:45And so, I gotta tell you today, I literally jump out of bed every day because I look at the US Senate and I think it is basically the Roman Coliseum. And you strap on, you snarmer and you grab a battle ax and you go fight the barbarians. And that is an amazing opportunity. I feel blessed and fortunate every day. You think it's become, we were talking with Rho Conna, Congressman from California earlier today. And we talked about how there might be good policy put forth by one of the two parties. But the other parties' intention is always to get more seats, get more attention, get more votes, and hurt the other party.

13:28So we end up having conflict over policy. Do you feel like there's too much of that in DC? And a lot of people talk about the, everything has become too politicized as opposed to, you know, I always think about the show. I love the show The West Wing. and he always talks about the great debate. We never have the great debate anymore. We don't talk about the fundamental policy decisions. We talk about the Republicans said this and so on so it gets personal and it gets political as opposed to like let's all take our hats off and talk about what's the right thing for the country. Doge being a great example of my opinion but I'd love to hear your point of view on how things operate in DC today.

14:00Well listen, I agree with your point at the outset which is that we need to talk to each other. I worry that we are too polarized and tribalized. The left only listens to left wing media, the right listens to right wing media, anyone who disagrees, you scream at them, the sense of community that we used to have has been badly unravelled on social media if someone disagrees with you and friend them. We're all in this little echo chain. But we're all patriots. It's the sad part. All Americans. All Americans. But we're living in alternate realities. And so look, what y 'all are doing is really important.

14:41I'm grateful for this podcast. We got to talk to each other. I do a podcast every week called Vertic with Ted Cruz. We've got about a million unique listeners that listen to the Vertic podcasts. And we do it Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Every week my podcast is beating CNN. Yeah, it's incredible. And I think the reason is the same reason people listen to you guys because you're actually talking about issues And you're not just screaming at each other, you know, it's it's not Jerry Springer. Go grab a chair and fling it at somebody But it's have a real and substantive conversation and I'll tell you one of the things that I've done and enjoyed is I've taken the Podcast on the road to college campuses and so what has happened like well for example we did want it at Yale a couple of years ago and had about 700 students come out and I didn't know how the reaction would be and interestingly enough about a third of the students were left of center and I know that because it was right after Kataji Brown Jackson was confirmed and I made a reference to that and about a third of the room began sharing and I stopped and I said hey look the fact that you're sharing it that shows that obviously we're coming from different places on political spectrum.

15:52I said, I want to thank you especially for coming here, because you may not agree with me on everything or even most things. But thank you for coming and being part of a conversation. And so we did about 90 minutes of all Q &A. And we had a rule we said, if you have a hostile question, if you have an antagonistic question, come to the front of the line. And we spent 90 minutes having a real conversation. Afterwards, I I went out with an orthodox rabbi on campus. And we got a drink and he said, Ted, I've been working on Yale's campus for decades. He said, this is the biggest group of students I've seen have a positive, civil, constructive conversation on conservative ideas.

16:35He said in 20 years. There's something about the podcast format where you're taking a little bit of time. You're not rushed in six or seven minutes like you are on the weekly shows where I see you all the time. And that's sparring. Yeah, and you're just trying to get a message out in three minutes, five minutes, but here, you know, you can open it up, maybe listen to each other, invite guests in with different opinions, learn something. With the, specifically with the immigration issue, which seems to be the one that's tearing us apart a whole bunch, there's so much consensus. Hey, we want the board of clothes, we want it legal, but we also want to bring in a certain number of people and we want a system.

17:08And, you know, I did my research on this and places that have consensus like Canada, Japan or Australia, New Zealand, just they seem to understand that you need to match immigration to the reality of unemployment and which jobs you need. But one criticism I have of politicians, which I think you're one of, is - Sadly guilty of charge. Yeah, you all don't talk about it in numbers. We need this many nurses, we need this many doctors, we need this many construction people, we have 4 % unemployment, record, great job to our politicians and helping that out, you know, we can bring in two million people this year.

17:46Hey, if it goes up to 5%, we're going to bring in 1 .5. I wish that the discussion could be more granular and with numbers. And you guys could actually say, it's not 500, it's 450. Because if we were in a business decision here and we do business together and we say, hey, we have to deploy these resources to get this outcome. But it's so contentious and polarized and not fact and number based. Why is that on this issue that you guys can't just put some numbers on paper? So, well, look, there are a lot of numbers that matter intensely. Let's start at one where you talked about low unemployment.

18:17As you know, that number can be deceptive because we also have among the lowest labor force participation we've ever had. 62 % right now. And so there are millions that have just dropped out of the labor force altogether. They're not measured in top line unemployment, but it's still a real challenge. We have healthy young adults who should be working who are not working. Why aren't you in your mind? Is it because they have the resources to not do that? Look, I think it, and I think it varies state by state, but I think when you have a welfare state where you get paid for not working, people end up not working and the statistics are really crushing that if anyone doesn't work for a year, the odds of they're going back to the workforce drop precipitously.

18:59That once someone gets the habit of dependency, I've said a bunch of times, you know, I try to think of every policy from the perspective of easing the means of a cent up the economic ladder. And I think about, you know, my dad, when he was a teenage kid in Austin washing dishes, thank God some well -meaning liberal didn't come to him and say, Rafael, let me take care of you. Right, totally. Just stay home. Let me send you a government check. Don't work so hard. And it's utterly destructive. It breaks your self -respect during individual responsibility. But it comes from an empathetic play center.

19:38So, and I know this, like in kind of a liberal setting, you see people in need, you want to help them, and you use government as a tool to help people in need. And the fundamental issue is that in many cases, that creates an incentive model that makes it very difficult for that solution, for that situation to find a solution on its own, a market solution. And over time, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and you have cascading effects that I believe we're now realizing in this country with what I estimated somewhere between 40 to 50 percent of people that are employed in this country employed by government or government service providers.

20:13And you're right that much of it is not from ill will. But we do need to have a real conversation about what works to lift people into prosperity. And by the way, all of us know this in our own life. If you're a kid, let's say you have a kindergarten who's struggling with math. There's not a one of us who would do our kids' math homework. We know that's not helping them. That if your daughter doesn't learn to do arithmetic, it's going to hurt her for the rest of her life. So you've got to work through that problem with her. Even if it'd be easier for you just to finish it for you. We know that in our lives.

20:48The old adage of give a manifest you feed them for a day, teach them to fish you feed them for a lifetime. We know that with people we love. But yet when it comes to public policy, you have a lot of people who don't think about it more broadly. I'll say back in 2017, I did three different CNN town hall debates with Bernie Sanders. And listen, I like Bernie because he is an ontopologetic socialist. And I'm an ontopologetic capitalist. And we had 90 minute town hall debates on which system was better for maximizing human prosperity and abundance. Yep. And we didn't insult each other, neither of us called each other a son of a bitch.

21:29We talked about the facts and I'll point out something, let's take socialized medicine. It's interesting, the advocates of socialized medicine, when I pointed out all of the problem socialized medicine produces in every country in which it's been implemented. The United Kingdom, Canada, Bernie's answer was, well, there wouldn't be that way here. So the reality would not be here. Every year about 50 ,000 Canadians come to America and what they call medical tourism because they can't get the medical care they need in Canada. And I will suggest to you a question, particularly for those of you all that are Californians, that I love asking advocates of socialized medicine.

22:08Why don't California adopt it? You've got a Democrat governor. You've got a Democrat supermajority legislature. There's no constitutional impediment. California could adopt socialized medicine today. It's not the mean old Republicans that are stopping them. And as you know, the legislature looked at it and realized it would bankrupt them. By the way, Vermont, Bernie's home state, they could adopt it. And the reason you don't see California and New York or Illinois or Vermont or any blue state in America adopt socialized medicine. It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work and people would flee their state.

22:40And so their answer is, we want to do it to everyone in the entire country so you can't unless you're willing to leave America, you're stuck. And I think what's challenging, Senator, is that then you have compromises that get you to a point where the federal government has a big enough role in healthcare. My opinion is much of the inflation in healthcare costs arises from the federal government's role in the same way that the federal government has a role in student loans that has driven up the cost of education and the federal government has a role in providing loans for housing has also driven up the cost of housing.

23:10Education. Education across the board. It's a free mark. But the empathetic solution is we need to provide access to those who can't get it. And then at the end of the day, it inflates the cost of all of those services. And ultimately, the quality of the services arose. And I'll give you the anecdote real quick. My brother lives in England. They just had a child, he and his partner, and they went to the delivery room and they couldn't get a bed for a late, she was in labor. They could not get a bed to have the baby. I think it took them 36 to 72 hours to actually get into a bed while she was in labor.

23:39It was the most insane. He's calling me, you can't get a bed. It was, I'm like, you're living in the friggin' UK. This is supposed to be one of the wealthiest nations on earth. That's the outcome of socialized medicine and along the way You get the inflationary effects that we're dealing with in the United States today. I'm with you on Let's say you're the quarterback. Okay, quarterback the next two weeks of the Trump administration Well on Monday, we're gonna see a flurry of executive orders. I think it'll be in the neighborhood of 100 executive orders I'm a hunter at them. That's the number they're talking about.

24:10Wow it it it's going to be in that neighborhood shock and i and i actually i'm i'm pretty happy about that now look well i agree with all one hundred i don't know i'm i guess is all agree with the vast majority of them but i don't know everything that's in there so we'll see and in some ways it'll just make it almost impossible for the democrats to react because where do you focus yes and and and jamaul that's actually a point you know i think back to so my wife hidey and i met on the two thousand and George W. Bush campaign. And so we both served as young people in the Bush administration. And I think there is a quantum of outrage.

24:47And I call it the arsenic quantum of outrage. If you remember the beginning of Bush 43, one of the first things he did is his EPA revoked a rule on arsenic. And for like six weeks, the media saturated the airwaves with the evil Republicans want to poison our children with arsenic. And I mean, it was it dominated forever and they'd be the living daylights out of it for. Now look, Monday when you get 100 executive orders, I think that's how much outrage there is and that arsenic quantum of outrage will be directed at everything. It smeared, which makes it very hard for them to oppose anything coherently and directly and gives an opportunity, I hope, for this administration.

25:31what I'd like to see is really delivering on the mandate of this election. The outcomes in November were there. If you had to distill what are your specific takeaways as the mandate? In priority. So number one, secure the border. And I believe that'll start on January 20th and it will start by ending catch and release so that when people are apprehended they are detained and they're sent back to where they came from. Yeah, I think that will be followed up by going and arresting criminal illegal aliens going and arresting murderers and rapists and child molesters and gang bangers. I think all of that will roll out very very fast.