(Headline USA) Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke author, on Monday released a list of 16 people he’d nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court or federal appellate courts if he becomes president, making him the first in the party’s field to itemize his possible top judicial appointments.
Ramaswamy’s list includes Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah as possible nominees for the nation’s top court, as well as elevating federal judges who struck down President Joe Biden’s airplane mask mandate and the FDA’s two-decade-long approval of the abortion pill.
The direction of the Supreme Court was a powerful issue for Donald Trump in his 2016 bid with the court’s narrow majority up for grabs following the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a much revered lion of constructivist legal philosophy and a conservative stalwart on the court throughout the treacherous Clinton and Obama years.
Had Hillary Clinton won, the selection likely would have gone to deeply corrupt Democrat shill Merrick Garland, the choice of then-President Barack Obama, who was a federal judge in the D.C. appellate court at the time.
During the 2016 primary, Trump released his own list of possible appointments to the high court to reassure his new party’s voters that he was in line with their judicial agenda.
While the move was a political hit, it also gave far-left activists the opportunity to begin planning their attack by providing a potential target list. They did precisely that with a baseless and spurious last-minute rape allegation that nearly derailed Trump’s second of three picks, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Like Trump, Ramaswamy, 37, has been gaining grassroots momentum as a political outsider who appeals to those beyond the traditional GOP base.
In an interview, he said he was releasing the list of possible appointments to show voters where he stood.
“It’s important, when you’re asking voters to select the next president of the United States, that you be as transparent as you can about what you’re going to do,” Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy is the latest Republican candidate trying to recapture conservative enthusiasm around the court as left-wing activists have become increasingly mobilized by its recent rulings, including the overturn of the controversial rulings that long upheld abortion and affirmative action.
Despite those victories, the court, led by centrist Chief Justice John Roberts, also has delivered some substantial setbacks to Republicans, including rulings that Democrats declared victories on related to court-enforced gerrymandering—a power that the U.S. Constitution delegates exclusively to state legislatures.
All three of Trump’s picks—Kavanaugh, along with justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—have wavered at times, including Gorsuch’s role in abetting the controversial ruling that extended Title VII workplace protections based on gender identity.
That 2020 ruling, in turn, emboldened the transgender community to launch a wave of “equal rights” activism that has alarmed conservatives due to its targeting of biological women and preoccupation, in many cases, with young children.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he’d appoint stronger conservatives to the bench than did Trump.
But Ramaswamy said he sees no reason to criticize Trump’s appointments.
“That is a bizarre criticism,” he said of the argument that Trump’s picks weren’t conservative enough.
Ramaswamy’s own list includes prominent conservative legal names. He said he’d only nominate Cruz or Lee if it wouldn’t change the balance of the U.S. Senate, which Democrats currently control by a two-vote margin, 51–49.
Another prominent name on the list for the high court is Paul Clement, who served as former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general.
Ramaswamy also proposed elevating several district court judges to the nation’s appellate courts. He cited Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an Amarillo-based federal judge whose April ruling against the abortion pill was swiftly reversed by appellate judges.
The list also included Kathryn Mizelle, whom Trump nominated at age 38 to a judgeship in Florida, and who struck down Biden’s air travel mask mandate last year.
An additional prominent conservative judge who made Ramaswamy’s Supreme Court list is James Ho, another Trump nominee to a position on the Texas-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ramaswamy said Ho first came to his attention because the judge quoted his own book, Woke, Inc., in one of his rulings.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
