Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Saturday that he would not support Loretta Lynch for attorney general and that the only "way to defeat ISIS is a simple and clear military objective.
"We will destroy them," Cruz said of the Islamic State to cheers at the Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H. The senator, 44, who declared his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination last month, was among nearly 20 hopefuls and contenders speaking at the summit.
The two-day event, sponsored by the New Hampshire Republican Party, ended Saturday.
"We need a commander-in chief who says the objective is not to weaken, not to degrade ISIS," Cruz said in answering a summit participant's question. "It is to utterly and completely destroy ISIS.
"We should be using overwhelming airpower directed at taking out ISIS in every location. We should be arming the Kurds. The Kurds have long been our allies. They are on the ground."
The Kurdish peshmerga forces are strong soldiers, Cruz said, but "they are outclassed in their weapons.
"ISIS is using American military equipment they seized in Iraq — and the Obama administration refused to fund the Kurds and sends weaponry to Baghdad, which won't pass it onto the Kurds."
Any decision on whether to use American combat troops should be "driven by the military necessities of accomplishing the goal of destroying ISIS," he said, and any U.S. involvement in any military conflict "should begin with a congressional authorization or a declaration of war."
Regarding Lynch, the senator said to applause: "My vote on Loretta Lynch is going to be unambiguously no. Unequivocal."
Cruz said that his decision stemmed from his questions to Lynch during her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is a member.
President Barack Obama nominated Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to succeed Attorney General Eric Holder in November.
Her confirmation vote has been held up in the Senate amid a stalemate between Republicans and Democrats over a sex-trafficking bill.
Obama
slammed the delay on Friday as "embarrassing."
"Eric holder has been the most partisan, abusive attorney general in the history of our country," Cruz told the crowd.
He said that when he asked Lynch whether she would support Obama's amnesty orders, "she said absolutely yes.
"I asked if there were any limits to this executive amnesty," Cruz added, and the nominee "refused to answer this question. She refused to acknowledge any limits on the president's authority.
"In my view, when you have an attorney general nominee who looks at the United States Senate and says he or she will not enforce any constitutional limits whatsoever on the power of the president, there is no way in good conscience … to vote to confirm such a nominee."