If Ted Cruz is elected president, he has big plans for the Supreme Court — namely, picking extremely conservative candidates to fill any vacancies among the nine justices.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he’d be different.
“Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative,” Cruz said.
As solicitor general, Bloomberg notes, Cruz argued in front of the court on behalf of his state.
Cruz specifically called out Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, and Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan, as bad picks. Roberts has gotten a lot of flack among conservatives in recent years for voting to uphold Obamacare, while Kennedy was castigated by the right for writing the opinion this year to legalize gay marriage.
The next president will likely have a few vacancies to fill. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy will all be over 80 years old by election day, while Stephen Breyer will be 78.
So how would Cruz find truly conservative justices? He said he’d look for candidates with “a long paper trail as principled conservative jurists.” This means jurists who’ve actually made decisions, rather than the sometimes more politically palatable candidates without as much of a record.
Read more from Cruz’s interview at Bloomberg.