The Dumbest Thing You'll Hear About The Supreme Court Today

Ted Cruz: shameless or stupid? You make the call!

Ted Cruz (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty)

Ted Cruz (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty)

Senator Ted Cruz, America’s creepy roommate, has built his career positioning himself as a “lawyer” even though most of the stuff he says leads legal experts to wonder if he actually learned anything at Harvard Law School. At least, anything other than how to complain about dildos.

By way of analogy, Ted Cruz is the guy explaining how to swap your clutch because he listened to Car Talk once.

That’s not fair… Ted Cruz never listens to NPR.

In any event, Cruz is at it again, spouting off about the Supreme Court with all the technical mastery of a concussed teenager:

Indeed there is! Not in almost 150 years, but that’s still a kind of precedent! What’s more, with the very limited exception of around 20 years of the country’s 227-year history — 18 of which were the first 18 of the Court’s existence — the Supreme Court has always boasted an odd number of justices, pending nominations to fill vacant seats. And, indeed, there used to be some vacancies even longer than the present one, but it’s an ambitious stretch to add all of those up into “plenty of precedent.”

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This is the sort of irresponsible legal sloppiness that goes hand in hand with tossing around misleading Supreme Court citations to hype his terrible animal-sacrifice research.

So does Cruz really believe this stuff he’s peddling? One hopes that a Harvard Law graduate who clerked for the Chief Justice understands that he’s just shamelessly pitching historical anomalies as justification for undermining America’s judicial system on the altar of petty gridlock. That would be better than the alternative, right? Harvard, for one, would feel a lot better about an evil grad than a dumb one.

On the other hand, maybe Cruz is just honestly confused. After all, in his native Canada the Supreme Court had only six justices until 1949. That’s plenty of precedent…

EarlierLegal Luminary Wonders If Ted Cruz Learned A Single Thing At Harvard Law
Ted Cruz Screwed Up Citation In SCOTUS Brief
Ted Cruz Is No Fan Of Dildos


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Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.