An Exclusive with Ted Cruz

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. I bet you get 30, 30, bet you get 30, bet you get 20, 20, 20, bet you get 20, 20, bet you get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. This episode is brought to you by Viore.

DJ X here jumping in real quick to talk shorts. The core short is the short that started it all for Viore. It's fitness versatility. It's one short for every sport. I wear these shorts. They're ideal for fitness, running, training, everything I do.

do but you know I'm also fly so they're also stylish and comfortable enough to wear all day every day right now you can get 20% off your first order at viori.com slash djx that's v u o r i dot com slash djx exclusions apply visit the website for full terms and conditions without exaggeration when we look back 10 20 30 years from now

The single provision of the one big beautiful bill that will have the most long-lasting impact is this school choice provision, which is a victory for millions of school kids across the state of Texas.

In Exclusive with Ted Cruz. Welcome to a special edition of The Texas Take. I'm Jeremy Wallace of the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News. And last week, as I mentioned, I want to try to... bring you more exclusive one-on-one interviews in the Texas Take. We're going to talk to key players in politics and beyond.

My hope is to get you beyond the sound bites and have you hear from the people directly in their own words with, well, at least a little pushback from yours truly. First up... Senator Ted Cruz. The U.S. Senator agreed to call me from the U.S. Capitol to talk about a key provision in President Trump's big beautiful bill that he helped craft. It deals with school vouchers. It's really going to expand school vouchers both in Texas and beyond.

I specifically wanted him to explain to y'all how this program is going to work in connection with the school voucher plan that you know Governor Greg Abbott just signed into law. Both of these will be happening almost at the same time. So listen to him explain how he's, one, a more serious legislator than...

many people give him credit for. And listen to how he has very little tolerance when I push back against him a little bit over his reputation as a bomb threat in the U.S. Senate and how we're now supposed to take him more seriously as a legislator. two key final points before we begin.

First, typically, I won't do these interviews via telephone, which isn't always the best audio quality. But in this case, given the schedule in the Senate, I thought it was important to get Senator Cruz on the air to talk about this issue that just hasn't got enough attention. in the media yet and how it'll affect Texas and Texas public schools.

Second, you'll hear him misspeak a little bit about one key point in here where I push back at him about how and whether this will help low-income families. You'll hear him say that only families at or below the poverty line will qualify for the scholarship program. creating. But his bill clearly says something else. It says that families making up to 300% above the area median gross income will qualify.

That means families making well over $200,000 in a place like Houston could qualify. Well, with all that, let's get on with it. Here's U.S. Senator Ted Cruz talking about the big, beautiful bill and the school choice provision that he was instrumental in crafting.

I want to thank you for joining me on this. I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the big, beautiful bell. Obviously, before all the tragedy that we've just all experienced, this was obviously the big news, and there's so much in that.

bill that I was hoping to kind of get to. And obviously we had to put it all on pause while we dealt with the emergency at hand. But I want to circle back with you because you had a couple of really important pieces to this bill. I think the first thing I want.

to really kind of drill down on, you know, this school choice provision was really interesting to me on a couple of levels. First, explain to me what is this legislation going to do? Well, this is the most far-reaching federal school choice legislation that has ever passed into law. And it is going to unlie billions of dollars of scholarship money for kids all across Texas and all across the country.

This provision, which I wrote and fought tooth and nail to get included in this bill, allowed every taxpayer in America to give up to $1,700 a year. to a scholarship granting organization in the state. That $1,700 will be offset by a dollar-for-dollar tax credit on your federal income tax. So if, for example... you owe $5,000 in federal income tax and you give $1,700 to a scholarship-granting organization, then you only owe the IRS $3,300, which means...

For you, the taxpayer, it's effectively free. Results will be billions of dollars flowing into scholarship-granting organizations, awarding scholarships to low-income kids in Texas and across the country. That is going to make a transformative difference in the lives of millions of kids, low-income Hispanic kids, African-American kids, Texans across the state, want and deserve...

access to an excellent education. As a result of this bill, billions of dollars of scholarship funds will now be provided to them. So like even states that don't allow for a school choice program specifically don't have an ESA program like the program that Texas has crafted. This is going to allow them then to be able to fund these scholarships regardless of that and help kids go to private schools regardless if that state has a state-sponsored school choice plan, right?

So yes and no. This provision changed multiple times because the Senate parliamentarian three different times was on the verge of throwing this provision out of the bill. And so I personally litigated the matter before the parliamentarian, which is very unusual. That's almost always done by staff. But this, for me, is a lifelong passion.

30 years fighting for school choice. I believe school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. We had to make a number of changes in the provision to get it through the Senate parliamentarian and to keep it in the one big beautiful bill. The final version that passed, every taxpayer in America can make contributions to scholarship-granting organizations.

and get up to $1,700 in dollar-for-dollar tax credit. So that's true for every taxpayer in the country. For recipients, the states have to choose whether to opt in. And that was a change that was forced on us by the parliamentarians. What that will mean, in all likelihood, is that red states will opt in. Texas will opt in. Florida will opt in.

schoolchildren and red states will get billions of dollars of scholarships as a result. We can anticipate that blue states, like New York and California... are likely to prioritize the contribution from teacher union bosses above the well-being of children in their state. And so blue states in all likelihood will not opt in.

What that will mean is if you're a taxpayer in New York or California, you can contribute to a scholarship-granting organization in Texas or Florida, but New York Democrats won't let the kids of New York get those scholarships. Now, I will say over time, I believe that will change. And one of the things that we very deliberately design in this program is to create the inverse dynamic.

of Obamacare and Medicaid expansion. Obamacare, the federal government, dramatically subsidizes the states expanding the Medicaid population. Some states like Texas have chosen not to expand Medicaid. But there's enormous political pressure. Every year, the hospitals come to the state legislature and say, we have all this free money from the feds, if only you'll expand Medicaid. And it is a constant political pressure on Red State.

This will be the inverse. And so a few years from now, parents in New York and California are going to look at states like Texas and Florida and say, wait a second. Why do kids in those states get billions?

in in scholarships and our kids don't and and it's only because the knucklehead politicians we have here won't allow our children to receive those scholarships and i think In time, my prediction is within a decade, all 50 states will opt into this because the parents in each state will demand it.

Okay, well, and now let's ship this to Texas. Obviously, as you know, look, I remember seeing you with that scarf that everybody wears during the school choice rallies in front of the Capitol. Like, I've seen you out there so many times, I've lost track. So I know you've been...

actually engaged in this for a long time. But we now have these ESAs that are going to go into effect. So, you know, parents in Texas are going to be able to send their children to private schools using up to about around $10,000 to help with the defense. of the cost of tuition what you've done now on the federal level is this a potential where like that family on the south side of san antonio who cannot afford to go to central catholic even with that 10 000

You know, they're still short another four or five thousand dollars. Could this program be that bridge to help them get that scholarship to get them there? Absolutely. And this is designed. for the scholarship-granting organizations to be set up in each state, and they can be designed creatively to meet the needs of each state and each community. But the effect of those two together...

is going to be billions of dollars made available to kids in Texas so they can get a better education. I think every child... in Texas deserves access to an excellent education, regardless of your race, your wealth, or your zip code. And for 30 years, I've been fighting for school choice. If you look at the battle in the state legislature, up until this year, Texas had been lagging behind other states when it came to school choice. You had other states like Florida and Arizona and Ohio.

that were trailblazers, and Texas was behind. And as a Texan, I hate Texas being behind in anything. I think we should be leading in everything. Now, as you know, virtually every U.S. senator... stays out of primaries in his or her own state. To the best of my knowledge, all 99 of my colleagues stay out of primaries in their own state. I do not. I get involved in a great many primaries.

The reason my colleagues stay out of primaries in their own state is it's politically stupid to get in the middle of it. There's an old rule of thumb that when you make an endorsement in a primary, you get half their friends and all their enemies. Yeah. And there's enormous proof to that. I decided six years ago, three legislative cycles ago, that I was going to get involved focused on one issue, and that is school choice. And each cycle...

My team prepares an Excel spreadsheet of every vote that every state rep and every state senator has cast on school choice. And my basic rule of thumb is if you voted in favor of choice. and you're otherwise relatively conservative, you are very likely to get my support. If you have voted against choice, the chances of getting my support are zero.

And if you have anything resembling a credible primary challenger, I am very likely to support your opponent. And when I support a candidate, I don't do so gently. I come in and endorse. and get money and do rallies on the ground and go on TV and go on radio. And over the last three cycles, there have been multiple Republican state reps who voted against choice.

that we came into the primaries and beat them. And so in April of this year, when the House was considering the landmark school choice bill, I went to the floor of the state house. I saw you there. And I was in the Speaker's office actively lobbying the state refs and telling, particularly the new freshman Republicans, that week I spent a quarter million dollars in ads supporting.

uh state reps who were voting in favor of choice because the teachers unions were pounding them and i wanted them to know they would have supported air color but i also and i'm telling them One at a time, I was saying, this is the single most important vote you will cap in your entire time at the legislature. But I also was quite clear, and if you vote the wrong way...

You can be certain I'm going to do everything I can to retire you from politics and put someone in place who will stand up and fight for the kids of Texas. Historic victory. Texas' school choice program is now the biggest school choice program in the country. Billion dollars. It will benefit nearly 100,000 kids. roughly $11,000 per child for kids with disabilities, roughly $30,000 per child. It's transformational. And then when you layer on top of it...

This massive federal school choice program that we just passed into law, the impact on Texas is, I think, without exaggeration, when we look back 10, 20, 30 years from now. The single provision of the one big, beautiful bill that will have the most long-lasting impact is this school choice provision, which is a victory for millions of school kids across the state of Texas.

Well, let me push back a little bit on one part of this, the part that makes me most nervous about this program. And I get I get the concept, right? Like we want to make sure that people can access private education and we're trying to help them get there.

is what we've heard in the legislature and really some of the criticism even around your legislation, which is the wealthy are going to be the ones who take advantage of this most easily because people feel like if you're in Pasadena, you still have a long drive to get your kid in a lot of... to fight through, especially if you're of lower income, it's going to be harder to get your kid to that private school to begin with, and you still have to get accepted.

And you have no control over that. But what we know is the people who are already in those schools, if I'm at San Antonio Christian School, you know, it's like my kids can apply for everything that you're doing. plus apply for everything the state's doing. They're getting, you know, basically help.

by already being in the private school system, and maybe it won't be as accessible to the kids on the south side of San Antonio or to the Fifth Ward of Houston, where it's just harder to get to these schools. Well, that argument is objectively wrong. Both the Texas state program and the federal program explicitly and by statute give a strong preference for low-income kids. School choice, the urgency behind school choice.

is not for rich kids. The rich in the upper middle class have always enjoyed school choice because if you're a wealthy parent, you either have the resources to buy a house in a neighborhood that is a great public school. Or if you live in a neighborhood with a lousy public school, you have the resources to pay tuition. The rich people have school choice. They had it a year ago. They had it 10 years ago. They had it 100 years ago.

School choice is all about giving low-income parents the same choices rich people have. It's all about that single mom in the third ward or the fifth ward that's struggling and who loves her kids. Listen, there is an arrogance among the Democrat Party that they assume that low-income parents don't love their kids. I promise you, moms and dads who are struggling love their kids. They want a better life for their kids.

And they're sacrificing for their kids. And we now know what the school choice does. We know that it produces results. When I first got involved in the school choice movement 30 years ago, it was at the time... mostly a theory. It was abstract. It had not been implemented in many places. And the argument that was used against it by the teachers' union bosses was if you implement school choice, it will destroy the public schools.

We now know that is empirically and unequivocally all. Why do we know that? Because school toys have been implemented in roughly 30 jurisdictions across the country. And the results are unequivocal. Number one. For the kids to use scholarships to make a different educational choice, to go to a different school, their reading scores go up, their math scores go up, their graduation rates go up, their rate of college admissions and attendance go up.

But here's the really powerful stat for the public school, for the kids who don't exercise choice but stay in the exact same school they were in before. It turns out competition is good. And we see math scores and reading scores and graduation scores going up because if you have a low-performing school, they either have to improve their performance. or if the parents are in power with choice, they will cheat to send their kids elsewhere.

Let's go back to the Universal School Choice Act that you crafted here and address kind of what you're saying. How is that going to be crafted to make sure that the target really is? Those lower income families to make sure that it's not private school kids already in the system, already getting benefits. What is in there that's going to make that happen? Because it's written in the wall.

In the federal statute, it is written in the law that the only kids eligible for this are kids that at 300 percent poverty level are below. So the scholarship structure that will be created in each state will have to abide by that, right? Yeah, that's explicitly part of the federal law we just passed.

Obviously, this is a huge provision. It's going to have a lot of impact everywhere. But that's not the only thing you had in the Big Beautiful Bell. What else should we be talking about right now? hundreds if not thousands of hours working on the one big beautiful bill and there are enormous victories in this bill for texas and for 31 million texas in this bill

There were seven major victories that I led the fight on. Number one, no taxes on tips. That was my legislation and President Trump's idea, but I wrote the legislation. It is in the bill. And it is going to benefit waiters and waitresses and bartenders and barbers and hairstylists and taxi cab drivers and millions of Americans who rely on fifth wages. And we're struggling.

but working to achieve the American dream that is real and meaningful tax relief for millions of Americans. Number two, this bill mandates... Federal government auction of wireless spectrum, 800 megahertz of spectrum. What does that mean? It means spectrum in the electromagnetic spectrum on which all of our electronics communicate, cell phone or Wi-Fi.

All of that uses electromagnetic spectrum. The federal government is the largest owner of spectrum. This mandate, auctioning off 800 megahertz of spectrum. That will do two things. Number one, it will generate for the federal government roughly $100 billion. That's real money that will go to pay down the deficit and pay down the debt. But number two, it will unleash billions of dollars of private investment and help create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Spectrum is all about winning the race to 60 and beating China. And this is, in terms of provisions in this bill, the Spectrum provision that I wrote in the law is... a massive job creator and will have a huge impact in terms of creating high main jobs in texas that's number two number three texas border reimbursement we wrote into law

$13.5 billion the federal government are going to reimburse the state, and Texas is by far the largest for feeding that reimbursement for the money that they spent securing the border when Joe Biden and Democrats refused to do their job. That's number three. Number four, NASA. I wrote into this bill $10 billion of funding in NASA to ensure that we go back to the moon, that the Artemis program be driven from the Johnson Space Center in Texas, that America beat.

China to the moon. That investment is critical. It's written into this bill. Number five, Coast Guard. This bill has $24 billion of investment in the Coast Guard. It is the largest investment in the Coast Guard in the history of America. I wrote that provision of this bill. To put that in perspective, the Coast Guard's annual budget is roughly $12 billion. This is nearly double their annual budget that is going to go, among other things, to building.

polar ice cutters, Arctic ice cutters. We're getting killed right now by China and the Arctic. And those ice cutters are going to be built in the United States. This will also help rejuvenate shipbuilding in the United States, including in Galveston. It is a massive investment in the Coast Guard. Number six is school choice, which you and I just talked about at late. And then number seven is the Invest America account. It's also called the Trump account. Yep.

This is another provision I wrote that will create a private investment account for every child in America. For newborn kids that will feed those accounts with $1,000. and family and employers can contribute up to $5,000 a year that will go into a tax-advantaged account. Those accounts will be invested in the S&P 500, a broad-based equity index fund.

And there are two massive benefits from this. Number one, every child in the marriage of will benefit from the miracle of compound growth. And here's some simple math. You have a little girl born next year. She has $1,000 leaded into a personal investment account, and her parents, her family, or an employer puts $5,000 a year each year into that account.

If you assume the historical rate of growth of the S&P 500, which is 7%, by the time that little girl turns 18, she will have $170,000 in that account. If she continues investing $5,000 a year... By the time she turns 35, she will have $700,000 in that account. That is transformation. And we're not talking just to kids or rich people. We're talking the kids of a single mom waiting table.

but now her daughter is able to accumulate resources and climb the economic ladder. Not only that, this provision... will create an entire new generation of capitalists. We've all seen the surveys that show young people are losing faith in capitalism and think socialism might be a good idea. Now every child in America will be the owner of the biggest employers in America. So 10 years from now, a little boy will look at his phone and see his app and look at the fund that he owes.

Instead of looking at companies as big, mean, scary corporations, that 10-year-old boy will say, hey, I own $100 with Apple. I own $75 with Boeing. I own $50 with McDonald's. And suddenly... Every child has skin in the game. And, Jeremy, I believe 10, 20, 30 years from now, the two provisions in this entire bill that will be most impactful, most transformational, and most remembered. are the school choice provision and the Trump account.

What's amazing about this, this is not a newsflash, but there's some people who have a different opinion of you. They think of you as the bomb thrower from those early days when the Obama administration was in office.

obviously, and they see you as that. And I know you and I, we talked about this. I want to say it was in the 2018 cycle. We talked about how you were trying to build your legislative chops as you were moving on, that you were doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes that a lot of people.

couldn't see necessarily. And now as we go through all of what just happened, the big beautiful bill, some of these were really big lifts. You know, I've looked at the school choice piece. You know, I've seen you trying to push this for years. You know, it's like, and I've seen it.

not succeed even with Republicans, you know, and even the, you know, the Trump box or whatever we're calling them. It's like, you know, this is another case where it's like, that is not an easy provision to get through. And so I'm now of this mindset, you know, I know it looks so much.

My listeners are going to be like, wait, Ted Cruz, the fighter, is also Ted Cruz, the legislator. Is that a role that we should now be paying a little bit more attention to on all this? And what's made this happen? Absolutely. Look, this has happened from the beginning. I have been legislating and winning legislative victories from my very first year in office. To date, I have authored and passed into law more than 100 pieces of legislation.

But I will tell you, Jeremy, there are some benefits to earning a reputation for being willing to blow the place up, which is nobody thinks I'm bluffing anymore. When I say this matters to me and I'm going to do whatever it takes, my colleagues believe me. I'll tell you on this school choice provision, repeatedly it looked like it was going to be stripped out of the bill. The parliamentarian had a high degree of skepticism.

And I told Senate Republican leadership, if we give up the fight on this, if this gets stripped out, I said, look, I've been a pretty easy vote on this bill so far. But if this gets stripped out, I will burn the whole thing down. This matters and we've got to do whatever it takes to make it happen. And that's a big part of the reason why they did it.

I think it's really interesting to watch this. And I always tell people people in politics are more than just what you see sometimes on TV. And so and I think this is a side of you particularly that I think, you know, again, it wasn't even behind the scenes on a lot of it.

And so I think that's what kind of caught my attention. Like it was like as you have this chairmanship now and knee deep in some really big matters, obviously, and pushing these major priorities that were within this bill. I think it was like impossible for people not. to see you like more legislating right now and not just the guy giving a speech from his desk. Yeah, look, we are winning big victories for Texas and literally winning them every single week.

Well, I can't thank you enough for getting on with me. And congratulations, you're the first full interview of the new Texas Tech interview session. Thanks again for listening to this special edition of The Texas Take. Tell me what you think, and if you would like to hear more interviews like this with other key players in Texas politics. I'm even open to suggestions of who you think I should bring on. We'll still publish our regular show.

typically on Fridays. And this week, we'll get into how the Democrats plan to fight President Trump's push to redistrict the state. And I'll share more exclusive audio from an interview I had with Governor Greg Abbott, where we talked a little bit more about Ted Cruz's school choice program.

Thanks again for listening to The Texas Take, and please be sure to hit subscribe and also sign up for The Texas Take newsletter, where I bring you up-to-date information on Texas politics every weekday. Thanks again for listening to The Texas Take, and I'll talk to you soon.