Sen. Ted Cruz received an unlikely boost on Wednesday from a senior Republican senator, who threw cold water on Donald Trump’s plan to challenge the Texas freshman’s eligibility for the presidency.
“I think it’s a pretty tough case to try and bring,” Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a longtime Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, told CNN.
Trump’s threatened lawsuit against Cruz, which would argue that Cruz isn’t eligible to run because he was born in Canada, is a key part of his case in South Carolina, where he is currently the favorite to win. Cruz dismissed the suggestion that he is not eligible as “frivolous,” but he has received little assistance from congressional leaders. Even Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who ran for president despite being born on a military base in the Panama Canal Zone, allowed that Trump raised “a legitimate issue.”
Hatch has a different view. “My personal belief is that there have been too many people who have run for president who were born outside the nation, especially Sen. McCain is a good illustration of that,” he said.
Still, the Utah Republican allowed that he’s not certain how the Supreme Court would rule if they took up the issue. “I can’t say in this raucous day and age that the Supreme Court might agree with me,” he said. “They may think otherwise.”
Hatch, a longtime proponent of deferring to the president when it comes to judicial appointments, said that he “agrees” with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pledge not to confirm President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“There is a real value in protecting the integrity of this court, which I have done my whole 40 years in the United States Senate by not letting it be in this tremendously volatile brouhaha called the presidential elections of this year,” Hatch said. “And I personally believe it ought to be put off until next year.”
