Some conservatives have wondered whether Ted Cruz’s support for the USA Freedom Act, which curtailed the National Security Agency’s ability to collect metadata from phone records in bulk, would eventually prove a weakness among a Republican electorate that is fundamentally hawkish.
Now, a little over a week after ISIS gunmen murdered hundreds of civilians on the streets of Paris and pushed terrorism to the top of voters’ minds, a conservative group is set to air ads that will hit Cruz for his support of the Freedom Act. American Encore, a group founded by Sean Noble, a former Koch brothers’ operative, is paying for the ad, which go up in the Des Moines, Iowa, market Tuesday morning on broadcast and cable. According to Noble, American Encore is putting about $200,000 behind the 30-second spot, which will air over the next two weeks.
The ad, which features scenes from Paris in the wake of the recent massacre, accuses Cruz of voting to “weaken America’s ability to identify and hunt down terrorists” and of supporting a bill that “was crafted to hobble the gathering of intelligence.”
It is rare for Cruz, a tea-party darling, to field attacks from the right, and because his presidential campaign hinges upon consolidating the support of the conservative grassroots, such attacks pack an additional punch.
Cruz’s critics see politics at play in his support for the Freedom Act, which revised a number of provisions in the Patriot Act and reformed the NSA’s metadata program, outsourcing its collection of phone records to telecommunications companies. On foreign affairs, the views of the party’s right flank can shift quickly from war-weariness to hawkishness, and the past few years have seen the GOP move away from the non-interventionism espoused by the likes of Rand Paul toward a more muscular foreign policy as the threat of ISIS has come more clearly into view.
Cruz voted for the Freedom Act in June. Back then, “he thought Rand Paul was his chief competitor, and now that we have renewed threats to our national security, he’s trying to act like he’s the Reagan in the field, and he’s not,” Noble says. “He has not been consistent in protecting the homeland.”
#share#It’s an argument that Cruz has already faced on the campaign trail from one of his challengers for the nomination. “At least two of my colleagues in the Senate aspiring to the presidency, Senator Cruz in particular, have voted to weaken the U.S. intelligence programs just in the last month and a half,” Florida senator Marco Rubio told a crowd of Wall Street executives last week. “And the weakening of U.S. intelligence gathering leaves America vulnerable.”
The Cruz campaign isn’t buying it, calling the latest attacks a product of the “Washington cartel” the senator so often rails against, and of his recent surge in the polls.
#related#“Because Ted Cruz is surging in the polls, the Washington cartel is now so desperate, they would openly abandon the Fourth Amendment that protects citizens from unconstitutional searches,” says Rick Tyler, Cruz’s national spokesman. He argues that the Freedom Act strikes the right balance between “keeping us safe and protecting our privacy.”
For now, Cruz’s position isn’t hurting him in the polls. A CBS News survey released on Sunday showed him surging to second place in Iowa, ahead of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and narrowly trailing real-estate magnate Donald Trump.
If Noble and his group have anything to say about it, that success will be short-lived.
— Eliana Johnson is Washington editor of National Review.