Ted Cruz Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

Senator Ted Cruz has harsh words in the Wall Street Journal for “woke” CEOs who criticize the new Georgia election law. But he doesn’t stop with a defense of the law or a recommendation that the CEOs stick to business. No, this paragon of limited government is threatening to hurt companies who express opinions he disagrees with: That’s breathtaking. As they say, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. We all suspect that politicians of both parties use tax money and the regulatory apparatus to reward their friends and hurt their opponents. Indeed, the most honest politician in history might have been Lord Bolingbroke, an English Tory leader in the eighteenth century, who wrote in a letter to a friend: And that’s exactly what Cruz now tells us he does. He is saying that he and his Republican friends have given businesses tax breaks, antitrust exemptions, and Ex‐​Im subsidies because the corporations made political contributions. But now that’s not enough: if the corporations don’t shut up about politics, they’ll get no more benefits from Republican officials. Cruz is no machine hack nor a naive Mr. Smith plucked straight from the Boy Rangers. He’s a graduate of Harvard Law School who has been a clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist, an associate deputy attorney general, and solicitor general of Texas. He wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on the Constitution. He might even have read Lord Bolingbroke, as I did, in Political Writers of Eighteenth‐​Century England edited by Jeffrey Hart. He professes, credibly, to have read Friedman and Hayek (who would have advised him to cut off the export subsidies on principle). He is thoroughly familiar with law and economics. So he knows just how bad his admission is, how corrupt he would declare it if a Democrat said something similar. One might say that Cruz is engaging in “cancel culture,” but that would minimize the offense. Cruz is not a university, publishing house, or student speakers committee. He’s one of 100 United States senators, entrusted by the voters to exercise judgment on public matters under the Constitution. He has failed to live up to that standard.