Following the Fox Business debate, GOP candidate Ted Cruz trails front-runner Donald Trump by 13 points in Republican polls. Cruz took a noticeable rise from the hefty pool of GOP candidates in November 2015, and although the Cruz campaign took a slow start in the polls, the Texas Senator has gained heavy support from social and religious conservatives.
Here is where Ted Cruz stands on some of the major issues:
The Budget: A balanced budget needs to be mandated.
Cruz supports a Constitutional amendment that requires Congress to pass a balanced budget. He argues that this is the best way to cut down deficits and debt. However, he recently led the effort to oppose the latest increase in the federal debt ceiling, receiving significant criticism from establishment Republicans.
At the 2014 CPAC convention, Cruz said the new budget would help benefit young people and without this push for economic growth, the “lost generation” would continue struggling to find jobs.
“We need to pass a strong balanced budget amendment,” Cruz said in a speech at the 2014 CPAC convention. “We need to stop bankrupting our country. Right now, our kids and grandkids are inheriting a country where our national debt is larger than the size of our entire economy.”
Immigration: Block all current efforts that allow undocumented immigrants to legally remain in the U.S.
Cruz names securing the border and stopping illegal amnesty among his top priorities on his campaign website.
“It’s not that we don’t know how to solve illegal immigration,” Cruz said on his campaign website. “What is missing is the political will to get it done. And, as president, I will get it done. We will secure the borders.”
Cruz has stressed particular opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
The Texas senator filed a bill blocking the president’s actions, which allows more undocumented residents to gain legal status, including any waivers for young people brought to the U.S. as children.
Cruz opposed the 2013 comprehensive immigration bill which passed the U.S. Senate, denouncing the bill for offering “amnesty.”
Common Core: No more.
Cruz has strongly opposed federal intervention in education, standing firmly against Common Core standards and arguing for greater local control over public education.
In numerous stump speeches, Cruz stresses that he wants to repeal the Common Core education standards the federal government places on states. He is a co-sponsor of Local Control of Education Act, which allows states to opt out of Common Core requirements without affecting their ability to receive federal grant money.
“Imagine embracing school choice as the civil rights issue of the next generation,” Cruz said in March 2015 at Liberty University. “That every single child, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of wealth or ZIP code, every child in America has a right to a quality education. And that’s true from all of the above, whether it is public schools, or charter schools, or private schools, or Christian schools, or parochial schools or home schooled. Every child.”
Cruz is also a major proponent of school choice and has voted in favor of making federal education dollars more available.
Social Issues: States should be allowed to define “marriage.” There should be strict limits on abortion.
Cruz believes marriage is between a man and a woman, and states should define the term “marriage” for themselves.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision nationalizing same-sex marriage, Cruz told NPR that only the four states listed in the Supreme Court case (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee) must abide by the ruling and that other states should ignore it.
“Today’s Democratic Party has become so radicalized for legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states that there is no longer any room for religious liberty,” he said at the 2015 Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition summit.
On abortion, the Republican lawmaker has called the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing the procedure a “dark anniversary,” but has not said whether he would specifically work to overturn it. Cruz has supported a Texas law that would require doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, but the law was ruled unconstitutional.
Islamic State: Don’t send U.S. ground troops, yet.
Cruz told ABC’s “This Week” that he doesn’t think the U.S. should send ground forces to fight the Islamic State “yet,” but he does, however, believe the U.S. should send arms to Peshmerga forces.
While he was campaigning, Cruz has said he wants to “carpet bomb” the Islamic militants and find out whether “sand can glow in the dark.”
“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops,” Cruz said. “You use air power directed — and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.”