WASHINGTON — Borrowing a tactic from former President Donald Trump, 2024 Republican Oval Office hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy released a list of potential conservative Supreme Court nominees Monday.
The list includes two senators, Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, former Attorney General Paul Clement and half a dozen of the most conservative federal appeals court judges in the country. Some of them have worked for limit abortion and Transgender rights.
Ramaswamy also named seven judges, from various federal district courts, the US Court of International Trade, and the US Court of Federal Claims, as a group from which he would select circuit court candidates. of the US if elected.
«We were looking for a diversity of views on the Constitution, but without a diversity of commitment to the originalist understanding of the Constitution,» Ramaswamy said in an interview with NBC News.
In May 2016, while clinching the Republican nomination, Trump shocked conservatives by announcing his own list of 11 people he could name to succeed the late Antonin Scalia. None of them were Neil Gorsuch, who Trump actually nominated and who now sits on the high court.
Ramaswamy said that you can add to your group later. But for now, he’s made up of Cruz, Lee, Clement and these six judges: James Ho, Lawrence VanDyke, smooth branchThomas Hardiman, Justin Walker, and John Bush.
Ho and Branch have said that will not hire paralegals from Yale and Stanford in retaliation for what they describe as the «cancel culture» at those universities. Ramaswamy, businessman and author, has a law degree from Yale.
Ramaswamy, a gifted public speaker who criticizes «woke» Democrats, has generated a modest stir within Republican circles, but polls are generally in the low single digits in national polls of the republican field.
Few issues are as important to Republican primary voters as the composition of the court, and candidates often try to reassure those voters that they will choose conservative judges.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who ranks second in national polls, said recently the three justices Trump put on the Supreme Court do not meet the «gold standard.»
“We’ll do better than that,” DeSantis told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Ramaswamy, whose list includes several Trump appointees, said the former president’s nominees have been «outstanding» on the Supreme Court and lower federal courts.
«It’s not just misplaced criticism,» Ramaswamy said. “Limit in stranger”.
He said his decision to release judge lists was not originally prompted by Trump’s use of the maneuver during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But when he released his own list on Monday, he knew full well that Trump had made similar moves.
Ramaswamy’s group of US circuit court seats is also made up of stalwart conservatives: US District Court Judges Martha Pacold, Sarah Pitlyk, Kathryn Mizelle, Matthew Kacsmaryk and Brantley Starr, as well as such as Stephen Alexander Vaden of the US Court of International Trade and Ryan Holte of the US Court of Federal Claims.