Ted Cruz, Mike Lee among Ramaswamy’s potential Supreme Court nominees

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Monday announced a list of candidates he would nominate to the Supreme Court if he were elected.

The nine candidates include Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as several federal judges who have delivered considerable conservative legal victories.

Ramaswamy’s decision to release a shortlist of potential nominees follows a similar track to former President Trump, who released candidate lists during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Most of Ramaswamy’s candidates were on at least one of Trump’s lists.

“President Biden’s focus on judicial appointments appeared to be on diversity of race & gender,” Ramaswamy said in a statement. “While I drew from diverse experiences — current and former federal judges, a former Solicitor General, two U.S. Senators — my sole criterion was to select candidates with an unwavering commitment to an originalist understanding of the U.S. Constitution, who also understand the unique threats to liberty in the 21st century (including lurking state action).”

The list, first reported by Axios, includes multiple federal appeals court judges, like Judge James Ho, a member of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who Trump suggested as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court prior to the 2020 presidential election.

In 2019, Ho was part of a three-judge panel that struck down Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. In a separate opinion, Ho wrote the right to abortion had no basis “in constitutional text or original meaning,” and the case ultimately became the vehicle that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Ho in a concurring opinion a year earlier called abortion a “moral tragedy,” and he is part of a panel currently considering a challenge to the federal approval of mifepristone, the common abortion pill.

Ramaswamy also celebrated the rulings of several other judges on the shortlist who struck down pandemic-era restrictions.

The presidential candidate listed Judge Justin Walker, who blocked a Democratic mayor from stopping drive-in Easter services in April 2020, and Judge John Bush, who found the Biden administration exceeded its authority in enacting a vaccine mandate for government contractors. Both judges were appointed by Trump.

Ramaswamy’s list also includes three other federal appeals court judges: Lawrence VanDyke, Lisa Branch, and Thomas Hardiman.

The list is rounded out with three non-judges, including Lee and Cruz, both of whom also appeared at times on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlists.

Ramaswamy also included Paul Clement, a veteran Supreme Court advocate who served as U.S. solicitor general under the second Bush administration. 

Clement’s recent argued cases include those that issued the biggest expansion of Second Amendment rights in a decade, the end of partisan gerrymandering lawsuits in the federal courts and a win for a high school football coach who was reprimanded for leading postgame prayers.