ON THE ISSUES | Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) kept a safe distance from the undercard debate, but his presence was felt in a brawl-starting question about a notorious liberal: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Just four days after Cruz told a conservative St. Louis audience that Roberts should have been passed over for a “conservative,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) went further, saying that Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, and former Justice David Souter should not have been placed on the court. (Cruz had also denounced the Souter nomination.)
“Look, you never worry about where the Democratic judges are going to vote, it’s always the conservatives,” said Jindal. “You’ve never had a Democratic judge wake up and say, surprise, I’ve evolved, I’ve become a conservative. It’s always the Republicans, because we have presidents that try to find judges with no records, no rulings, no writings. I’ll tell you, I am going to have a litmus test. For judges, I’m going to find judges that are conservative, judges that are going to be pro-life, judges that are going to follow the Constitution, judges, by the way, that are going to follow the American law, not international law.”
Jindal, who was a member of the House during Roberts’s 2005 nomination fight, had less to say about it at the time than any undercard candidate. Both Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and then-Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum voted for Roberts; in a 2005 statement, then-New York Gov. George Pataki called him a “highly experienced, qualified and accomplished legal scholar and Supreme Court practitioner.”
The Louisiana governor, who has yet to find a hard-right position he can’t endorse, was thus freed up to sidle up to the vast majority of Republican voters. In a July Gallup poll, taken after a 6-3 ruling against a lawsuit that would have struck down Obamacare’s tax subsidies, only 18 percent of Republicans said that they approved of the court.
Kennedy and Roberts have become the pinatas of that backlash, even though Roberts broke with Kennedy on gay marriage — and even though the subsidies lawsuit was seen as frivolous until it was finally granted cert.
“People of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today,” Roberts wrote in his dissent to the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. “This universal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is no historical coincidence. Marriage did not come about as a result of a political movement, discovery, disease, war, religious doctrine, or any other moving force of world history — and certainly not as a result of a prehistoric decision to exclude gays and lesbians.”
Santorum and Graham did not apologize for their votes. (Neither was in the Senate to support Kennedy or Souter.) The former Pennsylvania senator could only argue that the court, generally, needed to be reined in.
“We need as a president who’s going to fight a court that is abusive, that has superseded their authority,” he said. “Judicial supremacy is not in the Constitution, and we need a president and a Congress to stand up to a court when it exceeds its constitutional authority.”
He made no attempt to match Jindal’s previous reaction to the court’s rulings.
“The Supreme Court is completely out of control, making laws on their own, and has become a public opinion poll instead of a judicial body,” Jindal told a crowd this summer, as quoted by Baton Rouge’s Advocate. “If we want to save some money lets just get rid of the court.”