Sen. Ted Cruz praised former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sunday morning, calling her a “trailblazing advocate [and] one of the finest Supreme Court litigators to have ever lived.”
“She served for nearly three decades on the court, I argued nine times before Justice Ginsburg on the court,” the Texas Republican said to ‘This Week’ host George Stephanopoulos on ABC. “She was a brilliant justice, her questions were always incisive. She was a careful lawyer.”
Cruz, who clerked for then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1996, pulled from that experience and detailed how he saw Rehnquist and Ginsburg work together.
“He obviously worked every day with Justice Ginsburg, and I will say he admired what a careful lawyer she was,” he said. “Consistently of the lawyers on the left, of the judges on the left. Chief Justice Rehnquist was always most willing to give an important opinion to Justice Ginsburg because she wrote narrow, careful opinions.”
Cruz also honed in on the importance of filling Ginsburg’s vacancy with a constitutionalist judge ahead of the November election. The senator had been on President Donald Trump’s shortlist of Supreme Court nominees.
“We’re one vote away from seeing our religious liberty rights stripped away, from our free speech stripped away, from our Second Amendment stripped away,” he added. “This election matters, and I think it is the most important issue in 2020 — electing presidents and a Senate who will nominate and confirm strong constitutionalists to the court.”