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Ted Cruz Responds: Harvard Law Was Full of Communists


Photograph by Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call/Getty

Posted by Jane Mayer
February 23, 2013

Senator Ted Cruz has responded to The New Yorker’s report [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/ted-cruz-sees-red-not-crimson-at-harvard.html (about one-sixth of the way down in the post to which this is a reply; and also in particular open and view the two Maddow Show segments immediately following it)] that he accused Harvard Law School of having had “twelve” Communists who “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government” on its faculty when he attended in the early nineties. Cruz doesn’t deny that he said this; instead, through his spokesman, he says he was right: Harvard Law was full of Communists.

His spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told The Blaze [ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/23/ted-cruz-responds-to-new-mccarthy-new-yorker-article-curious-they-would-dredge-up-a-3-year-old-speech-call-it-news/ ] website that the “substantive point” in Cruz’s charge, made in a speech in 2010, “was absolutely correct.”

She went on to explain that “the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’—a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism—and they far outnumbered Republicans.” As my story noted, the Critical Legal Studies group consisted of left-leaning professors like Duncan Kennedy, who is a social democrat, not a Communist, and has never “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government.”

Among those who have taken issue with Cruz’s castigation of the Harvard Law School faculty are his former law professor, Charles Fried, who is a well-known Republican and former Solicitor General to Ronald Reagan. In his 2010 speech, Cruz had said there was only “one” Republican on the faculty, but his former professor, Fried, told The New Yorker there were at least four, including himself. A spokesman for Harvard Law School, Robb London, also described the school as “puzzled” by Cruz’s allegations.

Cruz’s spokesman called it “curious” that The New Yorker would cover Cruz’s speech “three years” after he gave it. But Cruz’s hostile questioning of Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, and insinuations about Hagel’s loyalties had provided a fresh context for looking more closely at the nature of the accusations he has leveled at political opponents. Observers like Senator Barbara Boxer wondered if they were seeing a revival of McCarthyism. Judging from Cruz’s speech—and, now, his defense of it—it’s a good question.

© 2013 Condé Nast

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/02/ted-cruz-responds-harvard-law-was-full-of-communists.html [with comments]

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a new condition Harvard Law School will have to meet if they hope to ever receive any contributions/gifts from me -- revoke and cancel Cruz's degree, and expunge him in the grand old Harvard tradition (meaning there would remain not so much as a single mention or shred of evidence in any Harvard document or record that Cruz so much as ever existed, let alone ever applied there, let alone was ever admitted, let alone ever attended so much as a single class there, let alone ever graduated)