On policies, Ted Cruz shifts his stance to suit a fractured GOP

Time and again he has shifted, shaded or obfuscated his policy positions — piling on new ideas, which sometimes didn’t fit with the old.

Cruz, for instance, promised libertarians that he would show a strict respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances.

Then, the senator from Texas promised social conservatives that he would scrap one of those checks and balances, stripping lifetime tenure from Supreme Court justices.
He criticized Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Then he seemed to support it. He appeared skeptical of military intervention in Syria. Then he vowed to find out whether “sand can glow in the dark” there…

“Now, he’s in this wonderful position where he’s both the last anti-establishment candidate acceptable who is not named Donald Trump, and he’s also the last establishment candidate,” said Matt Welch of the libertarian magazine Reason, applauding Cruz’s policy shifts. “That’s just a genius level of maneuvering.”