Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, again lambasted the selection of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Friday while speaking at the Heritage Action for America Presidential Forum in South Carolina.
“Both David Souter and John Roberts, they didn’t have a paper trail,” Cruz said. He explained that the political thinking of such appointments are that they spare the President an even more difficult fight with the Senate over ideology.
Cruz disagreed with such a strategy. “Every time we do that, we get burned,” the junior senator from Texas said. “When push comes to shove … the difference between me and the other candidates is that the I’m going to do what I told you I am going to do,” Cruz bellowed to enthusiastic applause.
Cruz made similar comments at Wednesday’s presidential debate at the Reagan Library, and doubled down on that rhetoric in South Carolina.
Channeling a line from the old cartoon comic strip Pogo, Cruz said “we have met the enemy – and they is us!”
Of Democratic Supreme Court nominees, Cruz said: “Every Supreme Court nominee they put forward votes like a radical, leftist nut case,” whereas half the Republican nominees have been “screaming, train-wreck disasters.”
The candidate went so far as to propose “judicial retention elections,” whereby sitting justices would be submitted to a retention election every ten years, and unpopular justices could be tossed.
“I wish it were the case that we didn’t need fundamental reform of the court,” he said. “If the justices were doing their job … you wouldn’t need fundamental reform.”
