OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
As speculation continues to run wild regarding the identity of the person or persons involved in the unprecedented leak earlier this week of a draft Supreme Court ruling, Sen. Ted Cruz offered a learned opinion of who he believes the culprit(s) may be.
The Texas Republican made his observations in response to the leak of the draft ruling to POLITICO written in February by Justice Samuel Alito enjoined by a majority of other justices overturning the landmark 1973 abortion legalization ruling known as Roe v. Wade. According to the unofficial ruling as it is currently written, the high court does not ban abortions but instead upholds a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks and returns the issue to states to decide on their own.
“The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right,” Politico reported.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes in the ruling, adding: “We, therefore, hold the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Now, the leaker has yet to be identified but some have speculated that he or she was a staffer for one of the high court’s leftist justices, including Cruz, who clerked at the Supreme Court as a young lawyer. In fact, he went on record saying he believes the leaker worked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was appointed by then-President Barack Obama.
Republic Brief adds:
The Texas Republican, who has condemned the unprecedented leak as “the consequence of the Democrats’ rabidly partisan effort to undermine the court,” made his remarks on the latest edition of his podcast “The Verdict” during a conversation with co-host Michael Knowles about the leak and its ramifications, especially when it comes to the SCOTUS as in institution.
“I had several reporters ask today ‘what if it was a justice that did this?’ I gotta tell you, I just don’t believe that,” Cruz said, ruling out the Obama appointee herself. “It is such a grotesque violation of trust, to me, it is beyond imagination that a justice would do this.”
“To use the nuclear code example, it’s like the president handing the nuclear codes to Putin, it’s just…I cannot believe that even the most left-wing justice would do this,” he added.
“I think it is very, very likely a law clerk,” he said. “And it is very, very likely a law clerk for one of the three liberal justices, that means there are twelve human beings who are your likely suspect pool, that’s not a big likely suspect pool.”
“It is likely to be someone who is a hard partisan, and who was willing to burn the place down because he or she was so upset about what happens,” Cruz continued, “If I were to guess, the most likely justice for whom the law clerk is clerking is Sonia Sotomayor.”
“Why do you say that?” Knowles asked in response.
“Because she’s the most partisan of the justices, and so, she’s the most likely to hire wild-eyed partisans as clerks,” he answered, adding that “I have no evidence of that. I’m just making an inference.”
Cruz then went on to address the gravity of the leak itself, which he and many other Republicans have called extremely serious.
“It is difficult to overstate how destructive it is to the Supreme Court, to the independence of the judiciary, to the integrity of the court, to have a draft opinion leaked during the process of deciding the case,” Cruz said.
“In over 200 years of our nation’s history, that has never happened, and there was one woke, little left-wing twit who decided to hell with his or her obligations to the justice they work for, to hell with their obligations to the court, to hell with their obligations to the rule of law, that they would instead try to sneak it out in order to put political pressure on the justices and intimidate them into changing their votes,” he added.
