Hey, remember when the media was so giddy about the “war” between Ted Cruz and Trump? Looks like Cruz and Trump have made nice-nice and Cruz met Trump at his Trump Towers in New York today. Ted Cruz for Supreme Court maybe? If you listen to globalists like Anal Pundit at Hot Gas, there is no way Trump would put Cruz in the courts.
| Ted Cruz meets with Trump |
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Statement on Ted Cruz's meeting with Donald Trump in NYC today via spox @catblackfrazier pic.twitter.com/KYD37CchBP
— Alan He (@alanhe) November 15, 2016
Is Trump … going to offer Cruz a job? I’ve heard conservatives speculate lately about putting him on the Court, but (a) Cruz isn’t on Trump’s of potential nominees (“This list is definitive and I will choose only from it,” Trump said in September) and (b) it would be uncharacteristic of Trump to reward Cruz for his earlier disloyalty with a plum as sweet as that, even if he did come crawling back and endorse Trump after the convention. Although maybe Trump likes the idea for that very reason, because his magnanimity would impress people and Trump-skeptic conservatives would swoon. Then again, there’s no reason to assume the job in question, if in fact there’s one on the table, is SCOTUS. If Giuliani’s out of the running for Attorney General, as seems to be the case, and Christie is now persona non grata in Trumpworld, that’s a big vacancy still to be filled. Jeff Sessions, a former judge, would be one possibility; Cruz, given his appellate experience, would be another. Would Trump be okay with a chief prosecutor who specialized in appeals rather than convictions at trial, as Giuliani and Christie did?
One reason that occurs to me for why Trump and his team might like the idea of Cruz at DOJ: If they’re planning to build on Obama’s expansion of presidential powers, and they certainly are, it would shore up their right flank to have Mr Conservative as their AG. They’ll take plenty of hypocritical heat from the left over separation of powers; it’d be nice if they had someone whom Federalist-Society-types respect in a prominent position of legal authority to signal, however implicitly, that any new executive power comports with the Constitution. “Would Ted Cruz work for a man who didn’t do things by the book constitutionally?” Trump fans will say, and that logic will carry weight. The question is, if AG were on the table, would Cruz accept? He’d have to give up his Senate seat, and he could lose his new job at a moment’s notice if he displeased Trump. Where would it leave his presidential ambitions if he spent a year as AG, got canned, and ended up back in the private sector?
But all of this is pie in the sky. Here’s the hard reality: If Trump names Cruz to any important position, Democrats and their media friends will have a field day replaying the clip below from the morning of the Indiana primary. Trump won’t want to give them an excuse to do that, especially so soon in his presidency. And given how much the Senate dislikes Cruz, there’s a real chance he would be filibustered in a SCOTUS confirmation vote. Would Trump nominate him without knowing first that 60 votes were there, or would he risk an embarrassing defeat by nominating him anyway? Maybe today’s visit really was just a courtesy call.