Ted Cruz plans 3rd Senate election despite pushing for change to two-term limit

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, said he plans to seek a third term in the Senate, although he has repeatedly pushed for a change that would limit senators to just two terms in the upper house of Congress.

Cruz confirmed Saturday that he plans to run for the Senate again in 2024.

“I’m running for re-election in the Senate. I’m focused on the fighting in the United States Senate,” Cruz told reporters during a news conference at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) event in Las Vegas, the Washington Examiner reported Saturday. “We must stand up and fight against these policies that are causing so much harm to Americans in this country.”

While it’s not at all uncommon for senators to seek a third term — or even fourth, fifth, and sixth terms — the Texas Republican has repeatedly attempted to limit the time lawmakers can spend in Congress. Cruz, with the support of several other Republican senators, introduced an amendment in January 2021 that would limit senators to two six-year terms and House members to three two-year terms.

There is currently no term limit for either house of Congress. The GOP senator also proposed a similar change in 2017 and 2019. Presenting the proposal in 2019, Cruz said longtime politicians “abused their power” and “created a brokenness” in Washington, DC

“The rise of political careerism in Congress today is a sharp departure from what the founders intended for our federal governing bodies. I have long called for this solution to the Washington, DC disruption, and I will continue to fight to hold career politicians accountable,” he said in a January 2021 statement.

news week reached out to Cruz’s press representative for further comment.

The longest-serving Senator in US history was Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who served in the upper chamber of Congress for more than 50 years. He took office in January 1959 and remained in the Senate until his death in June 2010.

Cruz is also considered a potential contender for the 2024 GOP presidency, having previously finished second in the 2016 Republican primary, when former President Donald Trump eventually won the party’s nomination. Cruz did not rule out the possibility of another presidential bid when asked by reporters on Saturday.

“You can consider whatever you want,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner. “There will be plenty of time to discuss the 2024 presidential election. I understand that’s a lot of fun in the media. There will be plenty of time for that.”

In that regard, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who just won re-election to a third term in the Nov. 8 midterm election, previously vowed to serve only two terms in the Senate. He defended his decision to seek a third term in January when he announced his intention to run again.

“It didn’t feel like running in 2016,” Johnson said in a campaign video. “At the time, my plan was to serve a second term and go home. But now that the Democrats are in total control, our nation is on a very dangerous path.”

The idea of ​​introducing term limits for members of Congress has at least some bipartisan support. Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive California Democrat, previously said he supports such a proposal.

“I support term limits so we can have new voices and new families in our politics,” Khanna wrote in a 2017 Facebook post. “First Lady Bush summed it up best: ‘If we can’t find more than two or three families who can run for office, that’s silly because there are great governors and great candidates out there. And I think that the Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes — there’s just more families than that.'”

Meanwhile, polls conducted by Insider and Morning Consult Sept. 8-10 showed that a large majority of Americans support imposing term limits on members of Congress. The poll of 2,210 respondents found that 84 percent want term limits in the House of Representatives and 83 percent in the Senate. The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.