Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said last week’s Supreme Court decision that paved the way for same-sex marriages nationwide is the result of most justices not taking their oaths of office seriously.
“What happened last week is twice, back-to-back, the U.S. Supreme Court — a majority of the justices, violated their judicial oath,” the 2016 presidential candidate said in an interview on NBC Monday morning. He was referring to both the decision to save Obamacare, and then Friday’s decision that states have to allow same-sex marriage.
Cruz said the Constitution allows states to change their own marriage laws, but he said the Supreme Court ignored that option. “What we saw instead is five unelected lawyers saying the views of 320 million Americans don’t matter because they’re going to enforce their own policies,” Cruz said.
Cruz called the justices a group of “elites” from Harvard or Yale who lack religious diversity.
“You’ve got nine lawyers, they are all from Harvard or Yale — there are no Protestants on the court, there are no Evangelicals on the court,” he added, echoing Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion. “The elites on the court look at much of this country as flyover country, they think that our views are simply parochial and don’t deserve to be respected.”
Cruz reiterated that the same-sex marriage decision and opposition to interracial marriage are not the same thing, arguing that there is “no religious backing” for opposition to the latter.
Cruz also defended his support for judicial retention elections, which he said should happen every eight years to keep the Supreme Court in check.
“Let’s be clear: The court has injected itself into politics,” he said when asked if he would want partisanship in the Supreme Court. Cruz said retention elections would be “a check when judges abuse their authority and violate the Constitution.”
