Cruz tells in new book how Trump got his support
WASHINGTON — With voters already heading to the polls in some states as a bitter battle rages over the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas writes in a new book that the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia was “perhaps the deciding issue” that put President Donald Trump in the White House.
It was also why Cruz ended up endorsing his one-time political foe, who had leveled a series of personal insults at the Texas Republican through a bitter primary, according to an excerpt of the book shared exclusively with Hearst Newspapers.
“The price of my endorsement was explicit: I wanted a clear, unequivocal commitment that he would nominate Scalia’s replacement from a specified list, and only from that list,” Cruz writes in the book, “One Vote Away,” coming out Tuesday. “For me, after dropping out of a hard-fought presidential race, securing a conservative jurist to replace the great Scalia was paramount.”
Cruz writes that he was concerned through the 2016 election that Trump might make “really bad nominations” if elected. And while Trump had put out a list of potential nominees for Scalia’s seat by the summer of that year, Cruz was worried Trump might stray from it.
“He said these were ‘the kind of nominees’ he would choose — those eleven, or presumably anybody else on earth,” Cruz writes. “He also said in February 2016 that he thought his sister would make a ‘phenomenal’ Supreme Court justice. His sister was a sitting federal appellate judge appointed by Bill Clinton who had already voted to strike down New Jersey’s partial-birth abortion law. So there was reason to be concerned.”
So in September 2016, Cruz writes, his team began negotiating with the Trump campaign to secure his endorsement. Cruz wanted Trump to make clear who he might pick for the high court, and Cruz wanted U.S. Sen. Mike Lee — a conservative senator and friend who endorsed the Texan for president — added to the list. The campaign agreed to both conditions, Cruz writes, and put out a revised list Sept. 23 with 10 more names, including Lee.
“I put out my endorsement in a lengthy Facebook post that I had written explaining why I believed conservatives should support Donald Trump,” Cruz writes. “Judicial nominations were the number-one reason.”
Many have credited Trump’s then-unprecedented move to name potential high court nominees for helping him win by securing votes of Republicans who otherwise may have been unsure about the candidate.
It’s something the president’s backers hope will happen again as he pushes to replace Ginsburg with another conservative justice before the election, a move Cruz
— a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would oversee the confirmation — has encouraged, along with the GOP majority in the Senate.
Trump earlier this month added Cruz to his expanded list of potential nominees, though Cruz — who has been open about wanting to run for president again — has said he has no interest in the job.
Cruz, however, has much experience with the Supreme Court. He clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and later was the longest-serving solicitor general in Texas history, arguing in front of the Supreme Court nine times and authoring more than 80 Supreme Court briefs.