Review: Ted Cruz’s “One Vote Away”

“One Vote Away serves as a useful primer on some of the great constitutional issues of our day, while also proving that legal judgment and political judgment are separate matters.”

Why are American politics so dysfunctional? Such a simple question spawns myriad answers, and most of them (correctly) point to the effects of decades-long structural forces on our politics. But if macro-level developments have set the stage for our political dysfunction, the poor leadership of the American political class certainly exacerbates it.

Part of the issue, surely, is incompetence. One need not look further than certain aspects of the Trump administration’s Coronavirus (COVID-19) response or to Senator Mazie Hirono’s questioning of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees to witness the unfortunate phenomenon of bipartisan incompetence and its corrosive effects on the body politic. However, the problem is not entirely—or even principally—incompetence, considerable though it is. There are plenty of intelligent, learned political leaders who knowingly play into the most destructive tendencies of their own tribe—whipping up unfounded hysteria, leveraging grievances, and knowingly peddling distortions of the truth for the sake of political gain.

Senator Ted Cruz has long fallen into this category. A former Supreme Court clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Senator Cruz is incredibly bright and is a gifted litigator. Indeed, Senator Cruz’s intelligence and legal acumen are on full display in his recent book, One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History. Senator Cruz relates how a number of 5-4 Supreme Court cases (in many of which he played an active role) were crucial in either protecting or debasing a number of Americans’ most fundamental constitutional liberties.

Senator Cruz’s constitutional and legal arguments in One Vote Away are, on the whole, quite persuasive. Take the case of Van Orden v. Perry (2005), a case revolving around the constitutional permissibility, under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, of a Ten Commandments monument erected on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in 1961. At the time that the legal challenge arose, Cruz was serving as Texas Solicitor General, and current Texas Governor Greg Abbott was the state’s Attorney General.