Ted Cruz Watch: Double Standards
February 2, 2022:
On this week’s edition of Cruz’s podcast, the junior senator from Texas condemned President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer as “offensive.” Explaining his reasoning, Cruz said, “The fact that he’s willing to make a promise at the outset, that it must be a Black woman, I got to say that’s offensive. You know, Black women are, what, six percent of the U.S. population? He’s saying to ninety-four percent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you, you are ineligible.’” (Black women, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, represent 7 percent of the population.) Cruz added, “If he came and said, ‘I’m going to put the best jurist on the court’ and he looked at a number of people and he ended up nominating a Black woman, he could credibly say, ‘Okay, I’m nominating the person who’s most qualified.’”
Cruz’s argument has a few holes. For one, presidents have historically adopted plenty of eligibility restrictions for the job: the Constitution doesn’t require justices to be lawyers, for example, but since the very first justice, John Jay, everyone to serve on the court has been one. That means, in Cruz’s terms, the exclusion of 99.7 percent of Americans! Not to mention that even the vast majority of lawyers possess nowhere near the qualifications we’d want in a SCOTUS justice. (No disrespect to the Attorney That Rocks, but “rocking” is low on the list of qualities that a prospective jurist should possess.)
As Cruz is aware, choosing to select from a certain group within the pool of qualified candidates is hardly rare. Donald Trump, before nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the high court in the fall of 2020, vowed to nominate a woman. “I will be putting forth a nominee next week,” he said. “It will be a woman.” Cruz didn’t opine then that Trump’s comment excluded the 49.2 percent of the U.S. population who are not women. And Trump, of course, was hardly the first president to consider such a criterion; Ronald Reagan, way back in 1980, made the same promise during his campaign before nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the court.
Second, the idea that there’s an objective “best jurist” is fraught. Debates exist over who the top performers are even in industries with advanced performance metrics—in baseball, we still debate who the best hitter is. As concerns the Supreme Court, there are candidates who are qualified (a small group) and candidates who are not (329.5 million Americans). The group of qualified candidates unquestionably includes some number of Black women.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/ted-cruz-watch/
