There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Trump would consider giving a Supreme Court seat to his erstwhile political opponent, Senator Ted Cruz.
Well now we know that he talked about the possibility with Trump’s top advisor.
Eliana Johnson reports at Politico:
Ted Cruz met with Donald Trump exactly one week after Election Day. As it turned out, Cruz’s tete-a-tete with the president-elect he had spurned from the stage of the Republican National Convention just months before wasn’t the most consequential meeting he would have that day.
After his talk with Trump, the Texas senator and his chief of staff, David Polyansky, then sat down with his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who sounded him out about his interest in filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the late Antonin Scalia. Cruz — widely considered one of the best Supreme Court litigators of his generation — swatted down the idea, according to four people to whom he has relayed the conversation.
Wow. That is remarkable.
And by that, I mean literally, I can’t help but remark and speculate about why he would shut down the possibility of cementing a yuge place in history by joining the Supreme Court. Perhaps he knows that Trump is capable of holding out a carrot like this with absolutely no intention of fulfilling it, in order to elicit loyalty from someone without it costing him anything. Or maybe he really doesn’t want the position and is holding out for something better that would be prevented by a Supreme Court position. I wonder.. what that.. might b-TEDNADO2020!!!
Eliana spoke to his allies who also speculated on why he rejected the possibility:
Several of Cruz’s closest allies said that despite his deep interest in the law, he turned his back on a potential Supreme Court nomination because he is fundamentally a political creature. “I think the bottom line with Ted is that the monastic life of a Supreme Court justice is simply not something that appeals to him at this stage in his life and that’s notwithstanding the fact that he has already in his young legal career established himself as one of the nation’s premier Supreme Court advocates,” said a longtime Cruz friend. “But being on that side of the lectern is a different thing. He’s an advocate, he’s passionate about advancing the causes he believes in.”
It’s something of an open secret among Cruz allies that the reason Cruz swatted down the Supreme Court inquiry is the same as the one propelling his eager cooperation with Trump: Despite Trump’s victory and Bannon’s overtures, his political ambitions are still simmering. He wants to be president and, at the age of 45, still thinks he can pull it off.
“Who knows what’s gonna happen eight years from now? Ted would be a young man, he would still be a young man,” said the Cruz friend. “Honestly, that’s another negative to being a Supreme Court justice, it’s a lifetime commitment…Ted wasn’t ready to lay down his sword and pick up a pen for the rest of his life.”
Makes you wonder what scheme is swirling around in the TedNado’s mind: