Did Ted Cruz Lie About Republicans Not Engaging in ‘Court Packing’?

Let’s talk about the definition of that term.

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A recent article from HuffPost claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz lied in denying that Republicans had engaged in court packing when they controlled the White House and Congress during the Trump administration.

The article—titled “‘Gaslighting 101’: Sen. Ted Cruz Ripped For One Of His Biggest, Boldest Lies Yet”—includes a video  clip of Cruz during a press conference April 22, speaking about recent Democratic attempts to increase the size of the Supreme Court. The video shows Cruz saying: “You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game. You didn’t see us try to pack the court. There was nothing that would have prevented Republicans from doing what they’re doing other than respect for the rule of law, other than basic decency, other than recognizing that democracy matters and packing the court and tearing down the institutions that protect our rights is fundamentally wrong.”

The video then shows text reading: “When Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, they loved ramming judges through the system, including at least 174 district court judges and 54 appeals court judges. Senate Republicans also confirmed three Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett, nominated after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, was confirmed a week before the 2020 election. Many called out then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for rushing Barrett onto the bench, considering he declared in 2016 that an outgoing presidency shouldn’t fill a Supreme Court vacancy.”

The article stated that “Given those very recent events, Cruz’s critics weren’t buying his claim that Republicans hadn’t rigged the system to stack the court” and linked to several tweets from detractors.

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  1. Kurt Von Fuchs

    You are using a very narrow definition of court packing. When Mitch McConnell broke his promise and yes that's what he did he broke a promise and refused to even hold hearings on Merrick garland nomination you can call this unpacking or whatever you want but it's just another way of saying the same thing.

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    Pastorfbt

    "Did Ted Cruz lie..." I didn't have to read any more specifics. Question answers itself.

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    Nick H

    What "new" definition? Have we really fallen to the point that when politicians twist language to score ideological points we're just going to nod and consider that valid usage? Words have meanings. Yes, language evolves, but not suddenly like this. Your fact check should be a clear and unequivocal "No. Ted Cruz did not lie." Instead you put up nonsense like this.

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    Pat Riot

    While I agree about the semantics here, this line of reasoning reminds me of the Republican "defense" of their voter suppression bill in Georgia. The bill was great and necessary and not at all harmful and not voter suppression because...

    "Democrats used the wrong adjectives to describe it! Meanies!"

    And here again Republicans are focused on *language*. Yes, the term "court packing" is unfair. So that's why the Democrats shouldn't add seats to the Supreme Court; because the Democrats are using unfair rhetoric to defend their proposal.

    That is, um, pretty darn *weak*...

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  5. Daniel

    Alec,

    A rather glaring omission from your article was the GOP's own attempt to redefine court-packing when Obama was the president.

    See the 'Stop Court-Packing Act' from Senator Cotton, which defines court-packing as filling in existing vacant judgeships.

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  6. Daniel

    Republicans didn't pack the courts, true.

    But is the new normal that a President who doesn't have a Senate majority doesn't get to appoint SCOTUS judges?
    Because that is the standard Republicans have set, by refusing to give Garland a hearing more than a year before the election while rushing Barrett to her new seat within a few weeks of Election Day.

    So Democrats are not using the right word. However the issue is real - SCOTUS judges apparently no longer get a hearing if the Presidency and the Senate aren't in the hands of the same party.

    A rather ridiculous state of affairs, I think most people can agree.

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      Bill Dyer

      We shall have to explain to Justices Sotomayor and Kagan that they're not really members of the Court on whose bench they've been sitting since 2009 and 2010 respectively. Neither was filibustered (which Garland would definitely have been); both were confirmed with significant GOP support.

      Are you willing to break this news to them, Daniel? I think the Wise Latina and the former Dean are going to be hard for you to convince.

      Seriously: We are indeed in a rather ridiculous state of affairs, but you're putting the blame on the wrong side for that. The only thing Garland was denied was a judiciary committee hearing whose vote would have been against him, followed by a filibuster on the floor that Obama had no hope whatsoever of breaking — in other words, the opportunity for the Dems to grandstand and showboat over a nominee who, from the very first day he was nominated, had zero chance of confirmation. If the Dems had had their way, they'd have filibustered Gorsuch; it was their palpable hypocrisy in wailing and moaning over Garland being denied a floor vote, while insisting on keeping Gorsuch from getting one, that prompted the GOP caucus, unanimously, to vote to nuke the rest of the filibuster that Harry Reid had cynically purported to leave in place for SCOTUS nominees.

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        Xaveria

        I've written above about how cynical and hypocritical the Democrats have been on this front. But giving the GOP and McConnell a pass here is equally wrongheaded.

        I'll concede your point that blocking Garland was reasonable, given his chances of confirmation. But pushing through Barrett at the last moment, given McConnell's words and actions in the Garland affair, was simply disgusting, and I say that as someone who's actually a big Barrett fan. "I want you to use my words against me," he had said. Even more disgusting were his words, on television, when asked about this obvious and ludicrous level of hypocrisy on display: "Well, we'll see what the market will bear."

        To me, those words almost sum up this last decade, the excesses of which have driven me firmly into the arms of the WeHateEverybody party. This brazen admission that promises don't matter, principles don't matter, the rules don't matter, even if they're rules that we just made. The only thing that matters is what we can get away with.

        Of course, deep down, and not so deep down, politicians have always thought and acted this way. They just always had to pretend to care about ethics, because the voters' collective ethics kept them in check. The real kicker -- the thing that makes me want to stock up on canned foods -- is that he was widely praised for this market-driven morality.

        Rod Dreher, who bills himself as an orthodox Orthodox Christian writer, wrote of his "audacious maneuvering," while admitting that, if he were in the Democrats' place, he would not take such shenanigans lying down. Dreher is, by almost any measure, the least crazy of the Trump pundits, and he represents, to me, the not-Qanon-brainwashed wing of the new right. He hasn't been drinking too deeply of whatever has been slipped into the water, but he has been putting his own tonic into the supply -- a hysterical fear of the far left which is so wildly overblown that it justifies absolutely any counteraction.

        At the end of the day, he regretting encouraging purple states to vote for Trump, he admitted that they shouldn't have taken the Devil's bargain. But mark this, and it's important, and it's why I've given up even on him -- *not because it was a Devil's bargain*. He always knew that. He always knew that Trump was a con man with the moral fiber of a brain damaged squirrel. He regretted having such a man represent conservative Christianity *because it didn't work.* Because the market wouldn't bear it anymore. Because we didn't get enough out of the bargain for our collective souls.

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      2. Daniel


        Lol if Kagan's 5 GOP votes was significant support then so was Alito's 4 Dem votes.

        Ok, but why was Garland guaranteed to be voted against? He was a perfectly qualified, pretty moderate candidate.

        And you can't tell me that people like Lindsay Graham didn't straight up lie about what they would do when faced with a nomination close to the 2020 election.

        Certainly democrats have their own hefty share of the blame, as you note with Gorsuch, and with the Kavanaugh and earlier the Thomas confirmation.

        In general both parties have abandoned their former standards of competency and general mainstreamness in SCOTUS judges in favor of partisan checklists.

        Which they do because voters ask for it. And personally I'm of the opinion that voters care so much about SCOTUS because Congress has been slacking on the job.

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      Xaveria

      I despise the former administration and its lackies as much as anyone and it is doubtful that I will ever forgive them. But the Republicans didn't start this "No judges for you" debacle. That was the Democrats, who pulled out all the stops to block almost all of Bush's appointments, by flat blocking them when they controlled the Senate, and by filibuster when they didn't. Only the threat of the nuclear option allowed Bush's Scotus picks to go through unfilibustered, and prompted the now infamous 'Biden rules'. Why do you think McConnel was so gleeful when he blocked Garland? It was straight up revenge, using tactics the Democrats had taught him.

      This is what happens when you break the game to win it. The Democrats started small, compared to where we've come, and they acted for what they thought were noble intentions. You know, the ones that pave the way to hell.

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      1. Daniel

        I mean, Roberts got by with half the Dem caucus.

        Certainly I think Reid was irresponsible.

        Then McConnell continued the irresponsibility. And then the Democrats used Garland to justify making kavanaugh and gorsuch difficult. Then the GOP, feeling hard done by, rushed Barrett in contravention of earlier promises made during Garland's nom. And so Dems were able to convince themselves they were the righteous ones all along.

        Wish somebody would take the duty more seriously.

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    3. Lanky

      Is it really the new normal? I heard somewhere that the last time a Republican Senate confirmed a Democratic SCOTUS nominee was in the late 1800’s. Haven’t fact checked it, but I know it hasn’t happened in the 51 years I’ve been on the planet.

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      1. Mark N. Dailey

        That's true, but Bush and Reagan got Thomas, Kennedy and Souter through Democrat-controlled Senates. I doubt that will ever happen again so yes I would say the (relatively) new normal is no SCOTUS confirmations unless President and Senate controlled by same party.

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    4. Daniel

      Given the GOP's own misuse of the term when Obama was president, I'm not particularly concerned about the mislabeling compared to the actual issue in question.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Court-Packing_Act

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        Bill Dyer

        And what was the fate of that bill, Daniel? How many GOP co-sponsors did it have in the Senate? Did it get out of committee? Was there a parallel bill in the House, and what was its fate?

        I call BS, sir. You cannot attribute one bill, introduced by one GOP senator, to reduce the size of one particular circuit court, which bill went absolutely NOWHERE, to the entire GOP.

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        1. Daniel

          Dude literally just google 'court packing obama 2013'

          https://www.google.com/search?q=court%20packing%20obama%202013&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m

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    Pat Riot

    What the Republicans did is not "court packing", but placing three justices on the court was Constitutional hardball and was done *without* the filibuster, which is exactly what Democrats are proposing.

    50 Republican Senators and a Republican president placed three justices on the Supreme Court. Democrats are just asking for the same courtesy.

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      Kmregan7

      They were only able to place three due to McConnell's blocking of Garland. Maybe he wouldn't have received the votes (I have heard that, and I have my doubts). But it would have given Obama enough time to choose someone else and have that person confirmed.

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  8. Lanky

    GOP ethics:
    Court packing: very very bad. 😡
    Court manipulation: very very good. 🥰
    Incitement by the Executive to sack another branch of government: depends who you ask, but generally ranges from “EFF YEAH! 😝😝😝” to “I mean, it’s not a great look, but what’s done is done. What’s the point of impeachment, when we should be doing the country’s urgent business? 🤷‍♂️🤔”

    So the acceptable path becomes clear: fire up a mob to sack SCOTUS building & assassinate the Justices you don’t like. Fill the vacancies with Justices you do like. Voila! Mission Accomplished! 🥳👏🎉
    A Supreme Court, hand-picked and non-packed, nice and clean and pure as the driven snow. 👍👨‍🍳💋

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  9. Patrick Cavanaugh

    The paragraph that starts “ It was only recently” needs to be updated with more examples. Many Republican politicians, and the Judicial Crisis Network, attempted to expand the definition in 2013 to cover the fight against Obama’s nominees to empty seats on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Examples:

    * Tom Cotton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Court-Packing_Act
    * Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, and Mitch McConnell https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jun/05/chuck-grassley/barack-obama-trying-pack-dc-circuit-court-appeals/
    * JCN and National Review https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/no-court-packing-ammon-simon/

    Republicans did fire the first shot here in expanding the definition and the fact check is incomplete if it doesn’t include that.

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    1. Daniel

      Very good catch.

      I'd completely forgotten about the GOP trying to call Obama filling in vacant judgeships 'court-packing'

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    Doug Palzer

    What's interesting about the change is that Democrats are arguing that what Republicans did under their new definition is bad. So, they've expanded the definition of "court packing," in a direction that makes their calls to "pack the court," as it was originally understood, more extreme.

    In other words, Dems are saying, "We've changed the definition to include your behavior as bad and extreme to try and doing something even worse and more extreme."

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