Massive School Choice WIN in Texas & Opportunity for Massive WIN Nationally, plus Stopping a Nuclear Iran
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Good Monday morning. Nice to have you with us. It's Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. And Senator, I hope you had a great Mother's Day with your family. We'll start with that as well. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there listening. And I know you wanted to say something as well.

Well, I had a wonderful Mother's Day. We took my mom out. My mom is 90 years old. We took her out for a dinner in town. We took her out along with Heidi and both the girls, and we had a great dinner together. As a family, we celebrated moms. My mom is 90 and still going strong. Heidi is a rock, and I'm just grateful for all the moms in our lives because...

There ain't nothing better. Amen to that. Amen to that. We've got a big show today, including a big victory in Texas that could have a big impact on the country on the issue of school choice, which is something you've been championing now for years.

Well, that's exactly right. We've got three big stories that we're going to break down tonight. Number one, school choice and school choice. Texas just passed the biggest, the boldest, the most significant school choice program in the entire country. We're going to tell you all about it and what it means for the school children in Texas. We're also going to talk to you about on school choice. We have an historic opportunity right now.

to win the biggest victory in the country ever on school choice as part of budget reconciliation. I'm going to explain to you how. We're going to talk also about Iran and their ongoing negotiations right now with Iran.

There are those who are advocating for another Obama-Iran nuclear deal, which would be disastrous. It would be terrible. I agree with President Trump and the red line that he has drawn that any agreement with Iran must include total dismantlement of Iran's nuclear capability. All of that, up next.

Yeah, it's a great story and it's one that's important. I want to also tell you real quick about our friends over at Patriot Mobile. You've heard me talk about Patriot Mobile now for a long time. And you probably already know that for years they've stood in the gap for every American that believes that freedom is actually worth fighting for.

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The media really hasn't been covering it. I think it's because they're terrified that this is going to give parents freedom to give their kids a great education. And there's a bill that passed in Texas. It deals with school choice. It's something that you have been advocating for for such a long time. Now it's becoming a reality. Talk about it.

Well, Governor Abbott just signed into law in the state of Texas the biggest, the broadest, the most significant school choice program in the entire country. This has been the result of decades of battle and hard work, decades that I've been fighting in the field. So I'm going to walk you through, number one, the details of the bill, the details of the bill.

It's a billion dollars that the state has allocated to school choice. One billion dollars. That is going in the form of education savings accounts. Education savings accounts that are going to be funded by the state to the tune of just under $11,000 for roughly 90,000 school kids statewide.

In addition, kids with disability are eligible to get education savings accounts that can be as high as $30,000. Now, these are not accounts that you're saving into. This is the state putting funding, making it available to parents so that they can choose the best school for their kids. It is historic. Many other states have done small little pilot programs. The breadth, the scope of this...

is massive, and it's worth remembering, Texas comprises 10% of the entire American population. Wow. Texas comprises roughly 10% of the school kids in America. So having robust school choice for 10% of the school kids in America is a massive and game-changing victory. And I've got to tell you, Ben, it's one that has been hard fought for a long time.

You know, if you look at school choice and over the past two decades, the states that have led on it have been states like Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and Texas has had been lagging behind. And I got to say for Texans, it is infuriating not to lead. It is infuriating not to be standing up doing the right thing. And Texas, it was a big battle. And our challenge was.

was not partisan. It wasn't Republican or Democrat, and it wasn't even ideological, conservative versus moderate. It was rather geographic, in that Texas has a lot of rural areas, and the challenge you faced is in the Texas State House, there were a number of rural Republicans who were good guys, but the biggest employer in their district is the public school district, and the school superintendents in the rural districts were

They vigorously opposed school choice, most significantly because the urban superintendents and the teachers unions hated school choice. And so what we had in Texas for a long time is a bunch of urban Republicans who would vote to kill choice programs. Now, I'll tell you what changed that. What changed that was a massive political effort and something I started six years ago.

Six years ago, I began intervening and making endorsements in primaries all across the state. And I got to tell you, Ben, out of 100 U.S. senators, to the best of my knowledge, 99 of them don't do that. They don't. Because why take the political risk? And it's where you said this is how we get it changed. It is, frankly, politically stupid.

for a U.S. Senator to make endorsements in primary races in his own state, and that's why none of my colleagues do so. Because when you make an endorsement, the old rule of thumb is you get half their friends and all their enemies. And so every time you do it, you're losing votes, you're losing support. Well, what I've done for three cycles in a row is I sit down with my team, I have them make an Excel spreadsheet, and I say I want to see every vote that they've cast, every state rep and every state senator, on school choice.

And my rule is, if you voted in favor of school choice and you're otherwise relatively conservative, you're very likely to get my support. If you voted against school choice, the chances of my supporting you are zero. And if you have anything resembling a credible primary challenger, I'm going to endorse your primary challenger. And when I do so, I don't do so gently. I come in.

And I and I hold on. Are you saying you're not subtle when it comes to you endorsing people? It's shocking. This is so off brand for you, Senator. Look, I come in. I cut radio. I cut TV. I get kinetic.

And my view is, all right, if you're not going to support choice, that's fine. But you're going to find something else to do because you're not going to be representing the people of Texas because the people of Texas want and deserve school choice. I think school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. And so for three cycles, I've done that. And there were a bunch of Republicans who voted against choice. And you know what? We've beaten almost every one of them.

They came in and we ran primary challengers against them and we beat them. And so this time, the state Senate passed a strong bill. They sent it to the House. And I'll tell you, I went down to the House. I spent an entire day on the floor of the House. This wasn't that long ago, by the way. It was in April. Yeah, you went all in.

I spent an entire day on the floor of the House. It is weird for a U.S. senator to be on the floor of the State House. That does not happen very often. I sat in the Speaker's office, and I was there trying to shore up the votes while they're considered school choice. And for everyone, I sat down, and there's some great men and women serving in the State House. And for those that are there, I told every one of them, I said, listen, this is the single most important vote ever.

you will cast in your time in the legislature. I'm here to tell you the teachers unions, they're going to spend millions attacking you when you stand up for the kids of Texas. And I wanted to tell them, I've got your back. I'm going to support you. And in fact, when I went and did that, I spent a quarter million dollars in TV ads support, actually not TV ads, digital ads, supporting state reps. And in particular, freshmen state reps who were standing up for school choice, who were demonstrating courage. And I did that to say, look,

You've got friendly ear cover, you've got support, but at the same time people understood the flip side. If you vote on the other side,

I'm going to do everything I can to retire you and put someone in that position who actually is going to fight to do the right thing for the kids of Texas. So let's talk about the practical aspect of this. What does this mean for a parent moving forward when it comes to their kid and practically apply school choice? Because, look, the Teachers Union Center made this incredibly clear.

I guess the best way to put it is they've complicated it with doom and gloom and extremism instead of simplifying it, which is part of the reason why we've seen some of you worried about school trips. You're like, it seems too complicated. Let's not do it.

Well, look, the teachers union is a scaremonger, but the good news is we now know the truth. So it was literally 30 years ago that I got involved with the school choice movement. I was a young lawyer, and early on in the 1990s, I was the national chairman of the School Choice and Education Reform Committee for the Federalist Society.

And I did that coming off of my clerkship with Chief Justice Rehnquist, where Leonard Leo, who was helping run the Federalist Society, asked me, would you lead this because you're passionate about this issue? And I'll tell you what I said, actually, when he did. He said, look, I said, I'd love to. But I said, to be honest, I don't have a record on this. I've never done anything on choice. I was a 27 year old lawyer. Sure. And so I said, I'll do it.

But I want to have a co-chair with me, and I asked for the co-chair to be a woman named Nicole Garnett. Nicole is a good friend of mine. She was a law clerk to Clarence Thomas. She was married to Rick Garnett, who was my co-clerk with Chief Justice Rehnquist. Both Rick and Nicole are professors at Notre Dame.

But Nicole at the time was a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, and she was litigating school choice cases all over the country. And so she had been representing, defending these programs and winning victories. And I said, look, Nicole's got a record on this. I've got passion, so I'm happy to do the work. But I didn't want to do it alone. We did it together.

I got to tell you, so in the 1990s when you were debating school choice, like in 1999, all right, I had a very odd speaking invitation. Where do you think I was invited to speak in 1999? I genuinely have no clue at all on this one.

I was the keynote speaker or one of the keynote speakers. If you say the Democratic National Convention, I'm going to laugh out loud. Worse at the at the National Convention of the ACLU. No way in hell. And the ACLU, they had a one on one debate on school choice between me and Juan Williams. Oh, yeah.

And you know Juan. And it was moderated by Barry Lynn, who runs Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who's a big lefty who hates school choice. And I did it in San Diego. There were over 500 hardcore left-wing ACLU activists, maybe the most hostile audience I've ever spoken in front of in my life. But I was out there pounding it away,

I will tell you, in the 1990s, when you were arguing about school choice, the teachers unions would say, if kids have a choice, it'll destroy the public schools. And I got to say, that's a serious and powerful argument. If that were true, Ben, I would oppose school choice. Sure. Because the vast majority of kids are educated by the public schools and for the foreseeable future will continue to be educated by the public schools.

Back then, school choice was a theoretical idea. Milton Friedman and other free market economists had talked about it, but it hadn't been implemented a lot of places. What has happened in the last 30 years is we have seen roughly 30 different school choice programs implemented all over the country, and we now know the facts. Number one, the claim that it destroys the public schools we know is objectively false because everywhere it's been implemented, that has not happened.

What has happened? Consistently, when choice is implemented, you see for the students who exercise a scholarship, who take another choice and leave off at a failing school to go somewhere else, the results are unequivocal.

Their reading scores go up. Their math scores go up. Their high school graduation rates go up. Their college admissions go up. It has a profound effect on the students that accept and use the scholarships or use the education savings accounts to choose a preferred, something they want more than where they were already.

But here's the striking thing that is really important. We now know that choice is also good for the public schools. So for the students that never exercise choice, that stay at the same school that had been struggling or failing, when the other students have the ability to exercise choice, we've seen quality go up, that competition is good. It turns out when you have to fight competition,

for your customers, for your clients, for your students, or else they leave, you end up providing a better product. We know that consistently across the country, and we're about to see it, I believe, powerfully in Texas in numbers that are frankly just bigger than any other state. So, Senator, the next question I got to ask is how do we get this federally? How do we have the ability for so many people to get what we just accomplished in Texas and

On the federal level, that seems like an uphill battle. It took you a long time to pull this off in Texas, and you got your hands dirty in the process. Well, it is an uphill battle, and it's a battle that I've been fighting for the past 13 years. Since I've been in the Senate, I've been the leading defender, the leading advocate of school choice.

The single biggest legislative victory that I've had that I'm most proud of in my entire time in the Senate concerns school choice. Back in 2017, when we were passing the Trump tax cuts,

I introduced an amendment that expanded college 529 savings plans to include K-12 education. So 529 savings plans let parents and grandparents save in a tax-advantaged way for college expenses. And I had an amendment to say this can now apply to K-12, to public schools, private schools, parochial schools, your choice. It ended up

passing on the floor of the Senate at one in the morning, it was a 50-50 vote, it was tied, and so the vice president came down at one in the morning and broke the vote, it remains to date the single most far-reaching federal school choice bill that's ever passed. Now, when Trump was president, I then introduced a much broader school choice bill. And it was a school choice bill that I introduced along with President Trump's Secretary of Education at the Department of Education.

And it would create a federal tax credit for contributions given to scholarship-granting organizations in the states. The states would administer them, the states would run them, but you would get a dollar-for-dollar contribution. So if Ben Ferguson gave money to a scholarship-granting organization in Texas, you would get a credit on your federal income tax for the amount of your contribution.

And it was structured so it was $10 billion a year, so $100 billion over 10 years. Now, there are no federal strings on the money, other than the only requirement is that the scholarship-granting organizations cannot discriminate against private or parochial schools. They have to let the parents and the kids actually decide. And as long as the parents and kids are choosing...

It is up to the states to administer and the parents and kids to administer. So that bill I rolled out at the Department of Education. President Trump in the State of the Union address called on Congress to pass it.

And we had a problem. The problem is every Democrat in the Senate opposes school choice because the teachers unions are the single most important donors and the most important foot soldiers for Democrat candidates. And so every one of the Democrats is more afraid of the teachers union bosses than they are motivated to help the kids who are trapped in failing schools. So we couldn't get it passed.

Now, your question, Ben, is how can we get it done at a federal level? Well, you know what we're doing right now? We're doing budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation...

means that we can pass a tax bill with only 50 votes in the Senate, with only Republican votes. So I'll tell you, I am making the hard run at my colleagues that we have the chance right now, as a part of one big, bold, beautiful bill, to pass the biggest federal school choice bill in history. We can get it done right now. The Democrats cannot stop it. If Republicans stand together... So I'm urging my colleagues... We had this past week...

we had a retreat of all the Senate Republicans. And we're talking about all the different priorities for budget reconciliation that we're trying to pass. And one of the things I stood up and said to my colleagues is, look,

This bill is going to be $4 trillion, $4.5 trillion. It's going to be a big bill that impacts a lot of things. A lot of what we're working on, individual tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, small business tax cuts, those are all massively, massively important. But I said we ought to focus at least a little bit on legacy. We ought to focus on 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.

What in this bill do people remember? What will make a difference 40 years from now that people will say, this changed the country, this changed my family? And the case I made to my colleagues is there's just about nothing we could do that would have a bigger legacy than school choice, $10 billion a year in federal tax credits for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations. In the states, you would see $10 billion worth of new scholarships

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I want to talk about what we also, some big news that deals with the issue of Iran. You went on Life, Liberty, and Levin, our good friend Mark Levin's show, and we're talking about Iran right now, and what they are actively trying to do. Fill us in on that for a second. Well, right now there's ongoing negotiation going on with the nation of Iran, and the Ayatollah

is a theocratic lunatic. He regularly leads mobs chanting death to America and death to Israel. And by the way, if history teaches us anything, it's that if somebody tells you they want to kill you, believe them. Yeah. And when it comes to Iran, I'll tell you, there are some voices in Washington in the administration saying,

that are pushing for another Iran deal. They really want an Iran deal, and basically they want... By the way, why? I've got to ask, because there's some of you listening that are going to say the same thing I'm saying right now. Why on earth would you want an Iran deal if you know that they cheated on the last deal? So, look, I don't know. I'm not Sigmund Freud. I'm not their psychoanalyst. I just know they're advocating for it. If you look at the Obama-Iran nuclear deal, the elements of it, it lifted international sanctions...

It allowed Iran to sell oil on the global market. And it allowed Iran to have its nuclear program continue unmolested. There are voices within the administration. And by the way, I led the charge.

to pull out of that disastrous deal, and President Trump did exactly that. He did the right thing. It was the single most important decision, national security decision of his first term, to pull out of the disastrous Obama-Iran nuclear deal. And right now, there's a battle within the administration, but I agree with the red line that President Trump has drawn. And he has said that any deal must include full dismantlement.

dismantling the centrifuges, shutting them down, that anything short of that is unacceptable. When you look at that deal, and I want to play part of what you said on Mark Levin's show, because it is more background just on how crazy the Aitola is in Iran and how big of a threat it is and why you shouldn't trust them. Take a listen. It's my understanding that the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate and the House

are saying Iran must dismantle its nuclear program. It's not a joke. You know what it means when people talk about a civil or civilian nuclear program. We're not going to be fooled. They must dismantle their program. Is that what you understand? That is exactly right. And I got to say, Mark, there's a real contrast between

between the strength that President Trump has shown with respect to Iran and the weakness and appeasement that Joe Biden showed for four years. The first term, President Trump took on Iran directly, pulled out of the disastrous Obama-Iran nuclear deal. He ended the civilian nuclear waivers. He ended the oil waivers. And the result, maximum pressure put the Iranian economy into freefall

Their oil sales fell from a million barrels a day of oil down all the way down to 300,000 barrels of oil. When Joe Biden came into office, the Iranian economy was in shambles and the Ayatollah and the mullahs were teetering and near collapse. But sadly, Biden reversed everything. He did complete appeasement. He stopped enforcing the oil sanctions and as a result,

The Ayatollah's oil sales skyrocketed from 300,000 barrels a day to 2 million barrels a day. That's $100 billion that Joe Biden and the Democrats gave the Ayatollah.

And the Ayatollah is using it to fund the IRGC to attack and kill Americans. The Ayatollah is using that to fund Hamas and Hezbollah in a very real sense. Joe Biden and the money he gave the Ayatollah funded October 7th. Now that Donald Trump is back in office, he's drawn a clear red line.

Iran must dismantle their nuclear capacity. They must shut down their centrifuges. It is the only thing that is verifiable is full dismantlement. And I have every confidence the president is going to hold that line. I do. But I don't have any confidence in the Iranians who lie and cheat and steal and murder. Yes. And so the question is, how can we expect a regime that does all those things and is not

abided by anything it's agreed to, anything it has promised over the course of the last 15 years. So here we are at the 11th hour. Here we are at the 11th hour trying to deal with this. How can we trust them? Or better put, we're not going to trust them. How do we make sure that they do what we tell them they must do? Well, listen, we can't trust them because we know that they lie and they lie over and over and over again. It's worth noting the Ayatollah right now today

is actively trying to murder Donald J. Trump, has hired hitmen trying to murder the president of the United States. The Ayatollah is also actively trying to murder the former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the former national security advisor, John Bolton. They have hired hitmen that are targeting former senior U.S. officials and the sitting president of the United States. These are not people who can be trusted, which is why the objective of

must be full dismantlement, must be the centrifuges disassembled, destroyed, taken out. And as President Trump said recently, we can do that either nicely or not so nicely.

Nicely, if they agree and we go in and dismantle them ourselves, or not so nicely, is if Iran refuses to negotiate, we have the capability to take out these nuclear facilities. And I gotta say, Mark, you and I have talked about this. Listen, there are some voices in the Trump administration that are on the isolationist wing of foreign policy that say, let's not worry about Iran, let's not do anything about Iran.

And listen, I am someone who is very reluctant to use military force, but Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons because Iran wants to be able to threaten to use nuclear weapons and they might even use them. And I believe a nuclear Iran is an unacceptable threat

of seeing an atomic bomb detonated in the skies of New York or the skies of Los Angeles. And so our Commander in Chief, President Trump, I don't think he's going to allow that risk. We are going to demand the centrifuges, the nuclear capability be dismantled, and they either do so willingly or they'll be dismantled unwillingly.

It doesn't seem to be any gray area here from you, Levin there and the president. It seems to be y'all are all in lockstep on the same thing here. You cannot trust Iran at all.

Well, and you asked why do people oppose this? The rhetoric they use is they say, well, if you're standing up to Iran, you're a warmonger. And let me be clear, as I mentioned to Mark Levin, I have consistently been very reluctant to use military force. You know, you go back to 2016, the presidential race.

You had 17 Republicans running for president that year. Set Rand Paul aside because Rand's views are unique in the Senate. Of the remaining 16, there were only two of us on that stage.

Who believed and said the Iraq war was a mistake. Donald Trump and me, both of us said the Iraq war was absolutely a mistake. I believe it was a mistake because you had a dictator, a cruel dictator, Saddam Hussein, who was killing terrorists. We came in and we toppled that dictator.

And the result was the terrorists took over and they began killing Americans. That did not help America. Toppling a dictator and putting the terrorist in charge was a mistake. By the way, we made the same mistake in Libya where you had Gaddafi, another very cruel dictator, but he was killing terrorists. We came in and toppled him and the terrorists took over and they began killing Americans. I think that's a bad trade-off. So when I say...

that we need to focus on American national security. It doesn't mean we should invade other countries. It doesn't mean we should send the Marines. It means we should look at serious, real threats to our national security. And I think the single most acute threat we face, the urgent threat we face right now, is a nuclear Iran because you've got a theocratic lunatic who has said,

He wants to murder us. And by the way, we know that he's willing to hire hitmen to try to murder the president already. And if he had nuclear weapons, I think the odds are unacceptably high he would use them. And so in the first term, what I advocated for and what President Trump agreed with was maximum pressure using sanctions, cutting off their financial system, violence.

Their economy went into freefall because President Trump stood up against the Ayatollah. And it was incredibly effective until Joe Biden undermined it by embracing appeasement. That was a massive mistake. And I hope and believe President Trump is turning that around right now.

Yeah, it is really incredible to see him standing up and saying, hey, there are certain things that we're just not going to deal with and certain things that we're not going to negotiate on. That's exactly what you're hearing from the president now. Don't forget, we do this show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So hit that subscriber auto download button wherever you're getting this podcast and make sure that you tell your friends about it. Put it up where you are on social media. And the senator and I will see you back here on Wednesday morning.

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