Supreme Court: Trump Floats Ted Cruz for Vacancy
In the latest Trump news, President Donald Trump has floated Senator Ted Cruz of Texas as a possible pick for a future vacancy on the Supreme Court, telling a midterm campaign crowd that the conservative senator would sail through confirmation because lawmakers from both parties would be happy to see him leave the Senate. The remark came at a rally in Lubbock, Texas, on October 27, where Trump had travelled to campaign for Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas. Cruz was in the audience, sitting in the front row, and laughed and smiled as the president turned him into the punchline of a joke about how hard it has become to get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed.
There is no vacancy on the court, and there is no nomination. What Trump offered was a hypothetical: if he gets the chance to fill a seat for a fourth time across his two terms in the White House, he said, he already knows how he would solve the confirmation problem. The crowd understood the joke for what it was, and so, by all appearances, did Cruz. But the moment also revealed something real about how Trump thinks about the court, about the Senate, and about a senator he has teased on this subject before.
Trump News: The Joke That Drew the Loudest Laugh
Trump framed the remark as a solution to a problem he described in plain terms: getting a nominee past the Senate is hard, because a pick has to survive both parties together. “I have an answer to not being able to get it past the Democrats or the Republicans together,” he told the crowd, before naming his answer. “I would pick Ted Cruz to be the next Supreme Court justice, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I wouldn’t have to make a phone call.”
The logic of the joke followed immediately. “The Democrats will 100% vote for it because they hate the guy and they want to get rid of him,” Trump said. “And the Republicans would 100% vote for it because they can’t stand him, they would like to get rid of him. So I’d get 100% of the vote, and he would be a Supreme Court justice and he’d do a great job.”
The line worked because it played on a reputation Cruz has carried for years in Washington: brilliant, combative, and not always beloved by his colleagues, even on his own side of the aisle. Trump has made that reputation a running theme, returning to it whenever Cruz’s name comes up in the context of the court. Cruz, for his part, took the joke in the spirit it was offered, laughing from his front-row seat while the president made his case. There was no sign that either man treated the moment as a formal announcement, and nothing about the rally suggested that a real selection process was under way.
Supreme Court: A Fourth Pick and an Old Frustration
The remark also carried an undercurrent of frustration. Trump has now named three justices to the Supreme Court during his first term: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Each was confirmed after a bruising Senate fight, and each was expected by supporters to anchor a conservative majority for a generation. Trump has since spoken openly about his disappointment with all three, after they joined rulings that went against his administration in a series of high-profile cases. That disappointment has become a recurring theme of his second term, and it coloured the way he talked about a possible fourth pick in Lubbock.
A fourth nomination would be a rare prize for any president, and a consequential one. Supreme Court justices serve for life, and their rulings shape American law on questions ranging from executive power to regulation, elections and civil rights for decades after the president who chose them has left office. That is precisely why confirmations have become so bitter: the stakes are permanent, the margins in the Senate are often narrow, and both parties treat every vacancy as a contest for the future direction of the court. Trump’s joke acknowledged that reality even as it laughed at it. His imagined shortcut, a nominee both parties would confirm simply to remove him from the Senate, was funny because it inverted the usual logic of confirmation, in which a nominee’s popularity is supposed to be an asset rather than the reason for his departure.
It is also worth noting what Trump did not say. He did not name a sitting justice he expects to leave, did not suggest that a vacancy is imminent, and did not describe any vetting or shortlist. The comment was conditional from start to finish: if a vacancy comes, and if he gets to fill it, then Cruz would be his answer.
Senate: Why Cruz Keeps Saying No
If the joke has a familiar ring, it is partly because Cruz has answered it before, and his answer has not changed. The Texas senator, now serving his third term, has said repeatedly that he does not want to be a judge. In September, he told the Houston Chronicle directly: “I don’t want to be a judge.” The same month, appearing on a podcast hosted by Sean Hannity, he went further, saying his answer was “not just no, but hell no.”
Cruz has also confirmed that the conversation with Trump is not new. At an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in April, he said Trump had spoken to him seriously about all three of the vacancies that arose during the first term, and that he had declined each time. His explanation was consistent on every occasion: he prefers the political arena to the courtroom, and the fights of elected office to the restraint of the bench. Where a justice must decide cases on the law as written, a senator gets to argue, campaign and legislate, and Cruz has built his career on exactly that kind of combat.
That background is part of why the joke is plausible enough to tell. Cruz is not a random senator plucked from the chamber for comic effect. He is a Harvard Law graduate who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and who argued cases before the Supreme Court as an advocate before entering politics. His legal credentials are the kind that would ordinarily feature on a judicial shortlist, and Trump has treated them as such in the past, raising Cruz’s name seriously as well as in jest. The tension in the Lubbock remark comes from that gap between qualification and desire: a man well suited to the court who has made it clear, again and again, that he does not want the job.
Trump Rally: A Line He Has Used Before
Trump has deployed the Cruz line before, and the Lubbock version was a polished repeat of a bit his audiences have heard in earlier forms. He made a similar joke earlier this year, and returned to the subject in July during a White House event promoting Trump Accounts, again suggesting that Cruz’s departure from the Senate would be one of the few things Democrats and Republicans could agree on. Each telling follows the same structure: the problem of confirmation, the name Cruz, the claim of unanimous support, and the punchline that both parties want the same man gone for opposite reasons.
The repetition matters because it shows how Trump uses the rally stage. A line that lands once tends to come back, and the Cruz joke does several jobs at once: it flatters a loyal ally by treating him as Supreme Court material, it mocks the Senate as an institution, and it signals to supporters that Trump is already thinking about the next vacancy. That Cruz himself has laughed along with it makes it safe to repeat, a piece of theatre both men understand.
Midterm Elections 2026: Texas and the Final Week
The setting for the remark was as important as the remark itself. Trump was in Lubbock to support Paxton, the Republican nominee for the Senate seat in Texas, in a race that has drawn national attention and heavy spending in the closing stretch of the campaign. Texas has long been a Republican stronghold, but the Senate contest there has been fought hard by both parties, and presidential visits in the final week are a measure of how seriously each side is taking the outcome. Early voting has already been under way, and Election Day falls on Tuesday, November 3, leaving only days for the campaigns to make their closing arguments.
In that context, the Cruz joke served a campaign purpose as well as an entertainment one. It put Cruz, one of Texas’s best-known Republicans, on stage alongside the president and the party’s nominee, in front of a Texas crowd, days before voters cast their ballots. It reminded supporters that the Senate majority, and with it the power to confirm or block future nominees, is itself on the ballot. A president who wants a fourth Supreme Court pick needs a Senate willing to confirm it, and the Lubbock crowd was being asked, in effect, to deliver that Senate.
What Happens Next: A Vacancy That Does Not Exist
For all the attention it received, the practical consequence of the Lubbock remark is, for now, nothing. No justice has announced a retirement, no vacancy exists, and no nomination has been made. Cruz has said no to the idea repeatedly, most recently in September, and nothing in the rally suggested he had changed his mind. The White House has announced no process, no shortlist and no timetable, because there is nothing to process. If that changes, the real sequence would look very different from the joke: a vacancy would open, the president would name a nominee after vetting, the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold hearings, and the full Senate would vote. Unanimous confirmation, the punchline of the Lubbock line, is not how that process usually ends.
History offers a useful check on the fantasy. The last sitting senator to be elevated to the Supreme Court was Harold Hitz Burton of Ohio, nominated by President Harry Truman in 1945 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate on the same day his nomination was announced. Burton resigned from the Senate at the end of that September and took his seat on the court on October 1. In the eighty years since, no sitting senator has followed him, a reminder that the path from the chamber to the bench, while not impossible, is one modern politics has almost never taken. Cruz would be breaking an eight-decade pattern if he ever accepted, and he has given no indication that he intends to.
The likeliest outcome is that the joke joins the collection of Trump rally lines that get repeated, reported and then filed away, resurfacing the next time a vacancy rumour circulates or the next time Trump shares a stage with Cruz. It will be remembered as a moment of campaign theatre in the final week of a midterm race, not as the beginning of a nomination. The court itself, meanwhile, goes on with its work, unchanged by a punchline delivered in Lubbock.
Source: USA Today