Ted Cruz on the last-minute battle for school choice

Photos: Yissachar Dunoff / Agudath Israel

Agudath Israel of America convened its inaugural Federal Advocacy Summit last week at the Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., bringing together key lawmakers, senior government officials, and Jewish communal leaders. The gathering offered a nonstop stream of political addresses and pointed panel discussions — and barely a moment to catch one’s breath.

Over a span of less than 20 hours, the summit featured a conversation with leading strategists on school choice; an extraordinarily pointed and honest panel with three pro-Israel Democrats on the future of their party; and speeches from prominent officials in the US Justice Department on anti-Semitism. The tone was partly celebratory and partly candid — and the pace unrelenting.

Here are some notable scenes that played out.

AT an afternoon cocktail party featuring some of the most staunchly pro-Israel members of Congress, Representative Randy Fine (R–FL) showed up wearing the bright blue yarmulke seen by millions of viewers on social media.

Facing off against UC Berkeley Chancellor Richard Lyons at a congressional hearing last Tuesday, Fine demanded to know why the university had appointed a professor who defended Hamas’s October 7 attack.

“How in good conscience can you tell my son he’d be safe at your university?” Fine scolded Lyons. “Jewish students do not feel safe on your campus.”

When protesters began shouting from the gallery, Fine didn’t hesitate, letting them know in no uncertain terms what he thought of their jeers. His unflinching rejoinder struck a chord on TikTok, where it rapidly went viral.

At the cocktail party, he regaled his friendlier audience with the story of what prompted him to begin wearing a yarmulke more consistently. It turns out it was actually people sitting in the very same gallery were the protesters sat in the now viral exchange.

“A few days after I started wearing it, I was the speaker pro tem,” he explained, “and when I was up in the speaker’s chair, sitting up there in the gallery was an Orthodox family.”

Three young children, all pre-bar mitzvah and wearing yarmulkes and tzitzis, were astonished to see the speaker of the House wearing a yarmulke.

“They like exploded with excitement,” recalled Fine, to the point the security had to ask them to quiet down. “They were talking to their parents and everything else, all excited, I thought that moment, you know, the Big Man Upstairs is probably sending me a sign that I ought to keep it on.”

Undoubtedly, the highlight of the summit was Senator Ted Cruz’s address, which he delivered during dinner. His arrival came at an especially charged moment on Capitol Hill.

Earlier that day, the Senate had entered what’s known as a “vote-a-rama” — the final, marathon-style stretch of the Reconciliation process, in which lawmakers vote on dozens of amendments in quick succession, often late into the night. It’s a blur of motion: floor bells ringing, staffers darting through corridors, senators ducking in and out to cast votes. It’s rare for a senator to step away from the chamber during the vote — and Cruz and Agudah staffers were in touch with each other throughout to ensure that he’d be able to give his scheduled speech without missing a crucial vote.

As soon as the moment arrived, the introductory remarks for Senator Cruz began and he was whisked from the Capitol to the Intercontinental Hotel just a few short blocks away. He took the podium and was at his finest.

This was no Tucker Carlson mob, waiting to pounce on him for a “gotcha” moment; this was a receptive and appreciative audience. For almost 20 minutes, he kept the audience spellbound as he gave an unvarnished, play-by-play account of how the school choice provision was introduced, then revised again and again until ending up on the president’s desk — in almost dramatic fashion.

After the House included the provision in its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Senate had its opportunity to revise it. In a bid to ramp up pressure on his fellow Republicans to include a more robust school choice provision, Senator Cruz headed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, to talk to the president.

“I sat down with President Trump”, said Senator Cruz. “I brought with me Byron Donalds and Burgess Owens — two dear friends, both passionate about school choice. The case I made to the president at the time was: Look, there are lots of elements of this bill that are important, but think about your legacy. If we get this done, you will go down in history as one of the greatest civil rights presidents this country has ever seen.”

Cruz acknowledged that the mainstream media wouldn’t come out and say that, but he argued that it would be the case nevertheless. “I said, ‘Look, your critics will never acknowledge that. But the substance will be there.’ And the case I made to the president is that we’ve got to remove the poison pill. This cannot be a four-year program, because the teachers union bosses will spend massive amounts of money to kill it. If it’s a four-year program, it will die in four years. And it needs to be bigger. It needs to be bigger to impact and benefit more kids.”

Cruz also added some color that the photo of him sitting in the gilded Oval Office didn’t provide: That was the day the Musk-Trump partnership exploded in spectacular fashion. A staffer walked into the office, and placed a paper on the Resolute desk. On it was a tweet the president’s erstwhile advisor and “First Buddy” posted on his X megaphone — the first of many taking aim at the president. Cruz didn’t repeat the exact words that escaped from the president as he read Musk’s incendiary comments.

“Suffice it to say, he was less than pleased,” he said.

The Senate ended up including a bigger and more beautiful school choice provision, as Cruz urged — before the Parliamentarian took issue with it.

“I went into the Parliamentarian’s office and personally argued the case to the Senate Parliamentarian,” said Cruz. “Now, I tell you, that is weird. That is pretty much never done. It is almost always staff. But I went in and made the case: This matters profoundly.”

But even if the Senate’s most formidable debater — Cruz was a national debate champion, Harvard Law graduate, clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist and Texas Solicitor General — was battling it out with the Parliamentarian, he sensed that there may be resistance from leadership.

“There was some risk that our leadership would say, ‘We can’t get it done, enough is enough, let it go.’ I’ll tell you, I went to Senate Republican leadership. I said, ‘Listen, on this bill, I’ve been an easy vote. I’ve been a yes for the beginning. But I want you to understand something right now: School choice is pulled out of this bill. I will burn the bill to the ground.”

The senator then offered some debating advice. “And I will say, there is a virtue to having built a reputation for being willing to blow it all up. Because nobody thinks I’m bluffing. And I’m not. And when you’re not bluffing, you actually very rarely have to follow through with it.”

The provision stayed, and 2025 became the year that school choice became the law of the land, thanks in no small part to the tenacity of a senator from Texas who fought for it to the end. Cruz wasn’t even finished with his remarks when Rabbi A.D. Motzen, Agudah’s national director of government affairs, got a memo from the senator’s aides that Mr. Cruz was needed back on the Senate floor for a vote.

(I tried catching the senator on his way out for a brief Q&A. When that didn’t pan out, I asked an aide if I could ride in the waiting Suburban with Senator Cruz to the Capitol building. That last-ditch attempt was ruled out for security reasons.)

Thursday morning, I was making a pre-Shacharis coffee at 6:45 when three Secret Service agents, distinguished by their coiled acoustic tube earpieces and subtle lapel pins entered the room, securing it for some of the most senior Department of Justice officials, who were part of the program later that morning.

Like their bosses at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the attorneys who addressed the Summit didn’t waste time on platitudes and niceties. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, tasked with leading one of the DOJ’s most powerful arms, laid out her division’s broadened efforts to confront anti-Semitism. She pledged to use her office to tackle anti-Semitism across institutions, jurisdictions, and levels of government — including enforcement of RLUIPA, a federal law that protects all religious communities from discriminatory zoning laws, and ensures that Orthodox Jews can build shuls, mikvaos, and schools without unjust government interference. RLUIPA has been invoked quite frequently in New York and New Jersey and is one of the most powerful tools a frum community has to fight against unfair zoning ordinances.

Judge Jeanine Pirro, the hard-charging former New York prosecutor turned TV firebrand, now serving as interim US attorney for Washington, D.C., brought her no-holds-barred style that has made her loved in the studio and feared in the courtroom. In her speech to the Agudah summit, she doubled down on her commitment to fight anti-Semitic hate crimes.

It was Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant AG and chair of the DOJ’s Antisemitism Task Force, who brought the house down. Wearing a cap embroidered with the name “Hadar Goldin” — the IDF soldier murdered and abducted by Hamas whose body remains in captivity — Terrell tore into American colleges and universities that haven’t done enough to protect their Jewish students. He railed against the idea of cutting a “deal” with universities, and pledged to continue his work relentlessly to protect the Jewish community, a charge he said was coming directly from the president.

The White House stood just a block away from the Summit, and some of us headed there on our way out to take the requisite photos. Under the new Trump-installed American flags now gracing the North and South Lawns of America’s most famous address, the mansion remains impeccable. Yet for all polished façade — the manicured lawns, the crisp podiums — those working inside of it aren’t interested in following the script. And for a community navigating complex policy fights and shifting cultural tides, it may be exactly what’s needed. This isn’t an administration that’s performing sympathy. It’s one that, at least when it comes to support for Israel, anti-Semitism, and school choice, seems to understand the stakes — and is willing to get in the ring.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1071)