WATCH: Ted Cruz’s Speech at Defending the Dream Summit 2014

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Senator Ted Cruz followed up his enthusiastically-received speech at the AFP Defending the Dream summit with a press conference shortly after he left the stage. The media gathered on Radio Row, including mainstream and New Media outlets. Cruz hailed the success of the conference in a brief opening statement and then took question. Politico’s Ken Vogel led off the questioning by asking Cruz if he planned to block funding for Barack Obama’s executive orders, and then followed up with a question about whether Cruz would lead a government shutdown over the issue.


Cruz responded at first by noting that “President Obama has been trying to talk quite a bit about a government shutdown. It seems,” Cruz continued, “the Obama administration has made the decision that they want this next election to be a national referendum on amnesty. I think it’s crazy, that 66 days out from the election, that the president, seeing the world on fire, seeing millions of people out of jobs here at home, that the president thinks the top priority in this country is unilaterally and lawlessly granting amnesty[.]” When the follow-up asked Cruz if it was worth shutting down the government over the issue, Cruz smiled. “It is a very funny thing,” Cruz replied. “There is one person, and one person only, talking about a government shutdown, and that is the White House.” Cruz responded that Obama and his team want to change the subject from the “manifest failures” of the Obama economic policies, ObamaCare, and the collapse of “the Clinton-Kerry-Obama foreign policy,” but said he wouldn’t participate in their attempt to use “smoke and mirrors to distract the American people.”

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