Cruz: Harvard Law did have Marxists

Sen. Ted Cruz’s office has chided the New Yorker for calling a three-year-old speech news, but has confirmed that the Texas Republican believed that the Harvard Law faculty had numerous self-described Communists.

Cruz, according to the New Yorker, said that there were a dozen Marxists on the law school faculty committed to overthrowing the U.S. government when he attended Harvard during the 1990s. But according to Cruz, there was but a single Republican on the same faculty.

Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the senator, told a conservative website that the Texas Republican's 2010 speech was substantively correct. 

“It’s curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it ‘news,’” Frazier told The Blaze. 

“Regardless, Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, 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.”

The New Yorker article came as media reports have discussed what The New York Times called Cruz’s “brash” entrance to the Senate. 

Cruz has played a significant role in the GOP opposition to Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska and President Obama’s nominee for Defense secretary.

Some Democrats have suggested that Cruz’s campaign against Hagel reminded them of former Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) and his crusade against Communism in the 1950s. Cruz has said that he had promised Texas voters he would shake up Washington. 

The New Yorker article had suggested that Cruz might have been discussing critical legal studies, followers of which have said they were influenced by Karl Marx, in his speech. 

Charles Fried, a solicitor general under President Reagan and Harvard Law professor, also chided Cruz, saying the Texas senator had undercounted the Republicans on the law school’s faculty.

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