Texas senator Ted Cruz put his opposition to the president’s pending Supreme Court nominee in the starkest terms yet, saying he would filibuster any name the White House submitted.
“Absolutely. This should be a decision for the people,” Cruz said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “We’ve got an election, and Democrats — I cannot wait to stand with Hillary Clinton or with Bernie Sanders, and take the case to the people. What vision of the Supreme Court do you want? Let the election decide. If the Democrats want to replace [Justice Antonin Scalia], they need to win the election.”
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Cruz’s Senate counterpart and presidential rival Marco Rubio added that the chamber wouldn’t move on a Supreme Court pick, echoing the position of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“[The president] can nominate someone, but the Senate’s not moving forward on it until after the election,” Rubio said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“There’s been a precedent established over 80 years that in the last year — especially in the last 11 months — you do not have a lame duck president make a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. So we’re going to have an election in November. This vacancy’s going to be an issue in this election. The voters are going to get to weigh in.”
Rubio added that he would hold himself to a similar standard as president, and stressed that a Supreme Court appointment “is not a law you can reverse … a policy you can undo.”
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Democrats have attacked Cruz, Rubio and their fellow Republicans for their stance on replacing Scalia, with Senator Chuck Schumer saying “show me the clause [in the Constitution] that says [the] president’s only president for three years.” Writing in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the Hoover Institution’s Adam J. White highlights a separate piece of constitutional text:
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