With the sudden death on Saturday of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the role of the next president to appoint Supreme Court justices will now take a more central place of discussion in the 2016 election.
Announced just hours before the GOP debate held in South Carolina on Saturday night, Scalia’s death became the focus of the first round of questions posed to the candidates. Their responses provided the only time the candidates spoke with unity during the rambunctious debate.
Given the advanced age of several of the justices, it shouldn’t have taken Scalia’s death to remind us of the startling picture of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders winning the right to nominate 2-4 justices over a two-term presidential administration.
But even if you forget about the Democrats’ vision of SCOTUS, does it make you feel any less nervous to think about Donald Trump appointing nominees?
Apparently, not everyone gets nervous about that thought. In a CBS Internet poll of people who watched the debate, people answered the question “Whom do you trust to appoint justices to the Supreme Court?” The (highly unscientific) results:
- Cruz 17%
- Trump 16%
- Rubio 13%
- Kasich 12%
For all his praise of Justice Scalia during the debate, what evidence is there that Trump would nominate an originalist to the court?
Cruz has the sharpest legal mind among the candidates. He graduated from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. When Rehnquist died in 2005, Cruz even served as one of the pallbearers—alongside John Roberts, who took the place of Rehnquist on the Court. And, Cruz argued nine cases before the Supreme Court in his five years as Texas Solicitor General.
In fact, Cruz could be considered a jurisprudence equivalent to Scalia. Not that President Obama would nominate him, of course, and someone might argue that even Republican Senators would never approve of Cruz. But that’s ridiculous. His harshest GOP critics in the Senate would be the first to cast a vote to send him across the street—out of the Senate chambers and into the Court.
But, Cruz is running for the White House, not a black robe. He is not the only GOP candidate who can be trusted to nominate originalist justices to the Court. However, Cruz is the only committed originalist that has beaten Donald Trump in a state’s primary or caucus.
Much is at stake in this coming Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
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