As I covered in 2013, Cruz' ties to the dominionist Christian right are deeply woven into Senator Cruz' life story [see: Ted Cruz Worked With Religious Right Founder Paul Weyrich, To Elect George W. Bush (Talk To Action)]; and so frequent public appearances by Ted and Rafael Cruz, onstage with leaders from the most extreme factions of the Christian right, must be viewed in this context, that Cruz and his father have been close to the leadership heart of the movement which has since the late 1970s given America its notorious culture wars [see: Video: Ted Cruz Anointed by Antigay, Pro-Religious War Pastors (Huffington Post), and Ted Cruz's Father Suggested His Son Is 'Anointed' to Bring About 'End Time Transfer of Wealth' (Alternet).]

Ted Cruz' father, Rafael Cruz, has recounted working in one of the original leadership groups of the emergent religious right, the Religious Roundtable, that helped mobilize Christian and religious conservatives to vote for Ronald Reagan.

Co-founder, with Rafael Cruz, of that effort was Paul Weyrich, considered by many to be among the top architects of the Christian right as an effective political movement.

Weyrich helped create much of the movement's early, key infrastructure; besides helping launch the Religious Roundtable, Paul Weyrich mobilized wealthy conservatives such as Richard Mellon Scaife to bankroll Weyrich's culture war crusade - which included co-founding the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Weyrich, a Catholic, also worked to draw conservative Catholics into politics and into a working alliance with conservative evangelical Protestants, and helped assemble the grand coalition, encompassing other factions as well - such as conservative Jews and the secular right, which provided the electoral margin that swept Ronald Reagan into office in the 1980 presidential election.

In turn, Ted Cruz would in 1999 capitalize on his familial ties to Weyrich, to arrange a key meeting between himself, Bush campaign operative Tim Goeglein, and Paul Weyrich that led Weyrich to throw his weight, and the weight of the movement he had helped build, behind the candidacy of George W. Bush.

During the legal battle over the contested vote recount in Florida in the 2000 election, Ted Cruz would also serve on the elite legal team marshaled by the Bush for President campaign to fight against efforts, by the Gore for President team, to force vote recounts that might have sent Al Gore, rather than George W. Bush, to the presidency.

Like the election of Reagan, the election of George W. Bush had a profound, quietly seismic impact that to this day is only poorly understood:

During the Reagan years, Christian conservatives, bearing a covert, revolutionary pro-privatization, anti-government agenda that would be quite familiar to today's Tea Party flooded into government; Under George W. Bush, that influx resumed, and the Overton Window was further shoved towards religious supremacy as dual Bush initiatives - both the Faith Based Initiative but also George W. Bush's far-less noticed PEPFAR program and simultaneous shift of US foreign aid money to conservative evangelical charities, redirected billions of federal dollars towards the partisans of the Christian and religious right. Both initiatives continue to this day and help enable the movement to thrive and, beyond American shore, expand.

And the members of the Cruz family, Ted and Rafael, helped make that possible.