Ted Cruz to announce presidential run

Hard-right Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce on Monday that he will run to become the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, making him the first White House hopeful to officially enter the race.

Cruz is a strong backer of Israel. On foreign policy, Cruz was among 47 Republican senators who signed a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader warning that any nuclear deal that is struck with the Obama administration and five other world powers could become null and void after the 2016 election — when the current president leaves the White House. He met with Netanyahu twice in the past year, and defended Israel during the summer conflict in Gaza.

Cruz, 44, has considerable appeal among the Republican Party’s base of conservative voters. After his election to the Senate in 2012, the former Texas solicitor general quickly established himself as an uncompromising conservative willing to take on Democrats and Republicans alike.

Criticized by members of his own party at times, he won praise from ultraconservative tea party activists for leading the Republican push to shut down the federal government during an unsuccessful bid to block funding for President Barack Obama’s health care law.

In a recent Associated Press interview, he said he wants to counter the “caricatures” of the right as “stupid,” ”evil” or “crazy.”

“The image created in the mainstream media does not comply with the facts,” he continued.

The son of an American mother and Cuban-born father, Cruz would be the nation’s first Hispanic president. Cruz was born in Canada, but two lawyers who represented presidents from both parties at the Supreme Court recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review that Cruz meets the constitutional requirement to run.

— AP, Times of Israel staff