Cruz’s head is going to explode now...his pal Mike Lee is on the list but not the Turdster?
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) September 23, 2016
Lee is Cruz’s BFF in the Senate and the Trump campaign has been nudging Cruz lately to finally come aboard and endorse. If Cruz is holding out on grounds that Trump isn’t conservative enough, Trump naming Mike Lee as a potential Supreme Court justice is a quick and easy way to remedy that. An even quicker and easier way would have been to float Cruz himself as a potential nominee, but maybe the politics of that wouldn’t have worked. If Trump had put Cruz on the list and then Cruz had endorsed, it would have looked like a venal quid pro quo by Cruz, with Trump having essentially purchased his endorsement by dangling a plum job offer in front of him. If Cruz is going to cave now, he needs to be able to save face by framing his endorsement in terms of principle. Putting Lee on the list instead of him is the perfect way to make that happen.
How about Lee himself, though? Is he going to bite on this? According to his spokesman, nope Why would he? Trump obviously isn’t going to nominate a critic if he’s president next year.
The Utah senator remains unmoved on Trump, even after the new list was made public.
“Sen. Lee already has the job he wants which is why he is campaigning to represent the great people of Utah again this year,” Lee’s communications director, Conn Carroll, said in a statement Friday. “This does not change Sen. Lee’s mind about Trump in any way whatsoever.”
Interestingly, Lee isn’t the only Trump critic to end up on a Trump SCOTUS shortlist. Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court used to goof on Trump during the primaries on his (very lively) Twitter account — until Trump named him as a potential nominee, which mostly put an end to the goofing. It’s highly un-Trump-y of the big guy to reward his detractors by pronouncing them fit to join the Court, but if it helps to buy their silence, maybe it’s worth something to him. Lee has, in fact, been lying pretty low in his criticism of Trump since the convention. I’m curious now to see if he follows Cruz when Cruz finally takes the plunge and endorses Trump.
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Mike Lee's brother sits on the Utah Supreme Court, one which I would rather see in the USSCOTUS...Mike Lee is a RINO, and is for globalism, CFR, H1B visas, TTP and TPA...
He might show to be a ‘conservative’ but that word has different meaning than what it did have...
NO MR. TRUMP!!! MIKE LEE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR US!!! WE IN UTAH KNOW WHAT AND WHO HE IS...PICK HIS BROTHER!!!
Everyone being vetted for the Supreme Court needs to be asked to tell us what they think natural born citizen means.
The founders meant born here of citizen parents.
Solely a US citizen and nothing else.
No possibility of foreign influence on the Presidency.
No foreign birth
No foreign parent(s)
No foreign citizenship(s)
Ted Cruz believes it means even if you are born in a foreign country with a foreign national father and are only an American on one’s mother’s side, you qualify.
Rubio believes being born here is enough, his parents were Cuban citizens.
Jindal does too, his parents were Indian citizens.
Thomas Rex Lee (born 1964) is the Associate Chief Justice on the Utah Supreme Court. His nomination unanimously passed a vote by the Utah Supreme Court Judiciary Committee in mid-June 2010,[1] and he was sworn in July 19, 2010.[2]
Justice Lee had one of his clerks later clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court.[3] Justice Lee is also a pioneer in law and corpus linguistics—the application of corpus linguistics to determine ordinary meaning in statutes—being the first American judge to do so in an opinion.[4][5]
Justice Lee is the son of former United States Solicitor General Rex E. Lee. He received his bachelors in economics from Brigham Young University (BYU) and his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Justice Lee has been a faculty member at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School since 1997, where he is the Rex and Maureen Rawlinson Professor of Law and teaches in an adjunct capacity after his appointment to the Utah Supreme Court.[6] In 2008 Justice Lee was appointed associate dean for faculty and curriculum at the Clark Law School.[7] Prior to his appointment to the Utah Supreme Court, Justice Lee also worked in private practice for the law firm of Howard, Phillips and Andersen.
In private practice, Justice Lee specialized in intellectual property law. Many of the intellectual property rights cases he has been involved in revolved around trade-mark infringements brought by or against automobile manufacturers such as General Motors and Ford Motor Company. He has also written multiple papers on the issues related to counting non-residents in the census with Lara J. Wolfson. He was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Justice Department from 2004-2005. In 2002-2004 he served as the lead counsel in cases brought by the state of Utah in relation to plans to put nuclear waste on the Gosuite Indian Reservation.
Justice Lee and his wife Kimberly are the parents of six children. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His brother, Mike Lee, was elected a U.S. Senator from Utah in 2010.
Ted’s plans have gone from... to...
POTUS
VPOTUS
SCOTUS
Eviction Notice
I wouldn’t take any senator if the balance in the Senate is affected.
I assume another republican would win Utah if Lee did step down, though.
I wouldn’t take any senator if the balance in the Senate is affected.
I assume another republican would win Utah if Lee did step down, though.
Lists are cheap. We won’t know how serious this is until Trump actually nominates someone. The watch the Democrats do everything they can to block and delay. I’m serious; we could see a six or seven member court before too long.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Good time for a release....Twenty one candidates....Obviously, some future Federal Judges in the mix.
Sen. Lee would be an AWESOME nomination.
Mike Lee would be great. Just read his book Our Lost Constitution. A true conservative constitutional scholar.
Trump could have been a cattle rancher. He's an expert in gelding.
Put all of them on the SC at once, and overturn 100 years of anti-Constitutional progressivism in one fell swoop. Then go back to 9 justices. A one time deal necessary to restore the rule of law and deter future judge-made law.
Amul Thapar is an Indian-American.