Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has been mocked for a trolling tweet promoting conservative activist and pundit Candace Owens for the Supreme Court.
“Am I really trending because America wants me to be the next Supreme Court justice? What an honor!” Ms Owens tweeted last week.
Following the announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s imminent retirement, President Joe Biden reiterated his 2020 election promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
“It would be my absolute honor to accept this nomination on behalf of the American people. I assure you I meet all the necessary qualifications as I am both black and female. I look forward to establishing further communication with the Biden administration,” Ms Owens tweeted with apparent derision on 27 January.
“@RealCandaceO for SCOTUS!” Mr Cruz tweeted on Tuesday.
Political scientist Seth Masket responded: “You’re a Senator, for God’s sake. She recently declared the Moon landings faked.”
“Now for some light-hearted fun,” Ms Owens tweeted on 28 January. “What’s the one ‘conspiracy theory’ that no matter what anyone says you believe is true. Mine is that the moon landing in 1969 was completely faked. Just nothing about it makes sense.”
“Crap like this is why no one takes you seriously,” one Twitter user wrote in response to Mr Cruz’s Supreme Court suggestion.
“I’m too old to remember when Ted Cruz pretended to be a serious constitutional conservative senator. What a clown,” Republicans against Trumpism tweeted.
“I would say this is embarrassing but it assumes Ted is capable of shame and he is not,” another account holder said.
One Twitter user said that “Republicans love Candace Owens because she gives them permission to be racists”.
“Love yourself as much as Ted Cruz hates himself,” Wajahat Ali added.
“So irrelevant he tweets s**t like this to get people to pay attention to him. Sad,” another Twitter user wrote.
Mr Cruz said earlier that Mr Biden’s promise to replace Justice Breyer with a Black woman is “offensive” and an “insult to Black women”.
“The fact that he’s willing to make a promise at the outset, that it must be a Black woman, I got to say, that’s offensive,” Mr Cruz said on his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz. “Black women are, what, six per cent of the US population? He’s saying to 94 per cent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you’.”
“It’s actually an insult to Black women – if he came and he said ‘I’m going to put the best jurist on the court’ and he looked at a number of people and he ended up nominating a Black woman – he could credibly say ‘I’m nominating the person who’s most qualified’,” he added.
“He’s not even pretending to say that, he’s saying ‘if you’re a white guy – tough luck, if you’re a white woman – tough luck, if you’re [Attorney General and 2016 Supreme Court nominee] Merrick Garland – how much does it suck to be Merrick Garland?” Mr Cruz pondered.
“He literally has to sit there and be told at the outset he is ineligible, because sorry – wrong skin pigment and wrong y chromosome,” Mr Cruz added. “It’s an example [of] how Democrats, and in particular the far left – everything is race, they will discriminate based on race, they will pigeonhole you, they don’t care about the ... individual.”
Twitter users were also quick to blast Mr Cruz for those comments, with one account holder asking, “when’s the last time Ted Cruz asked a black woman her opinion on anything?”
“Please don’t argue with these people and just call them racists. Won’t fix them but it will save a lot of time,” another social media user said.
“How do you say ‘I want to criticize this political decision’, and somehow arrive at the worst possible way to go about it?” a third tweeted.
While pundits and politicians on the right criticised Mr Biden’s decision to announce ahead of time that his nominee would be a Black woman, it’s not a new phenomenon for presidents, Republicans included, to decide the gender of a new justice ahead of time.
“It will be a woman, a very talented, very brilliant woman,” then-President Donald Trump said at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina in September 2020 following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to The Washington Post. “I haven’t chosen yet, but we have numerous women on the list.”
Mr Trump then nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
President Ronald Reagan, then the Republican nominee, pledged late in the 1980 campaign to nominate a woman if given the chance. He said he would select “the most qualified woman I can possibly find”.
“It is time for a woman to sit among the highest jurists,” he added.
When Justice Thurgood Marshall retired during the presidency of George HW Bush, the commander in chief said his selection would not depend on a “quota”, but administration staffers revealed at the time that his search for a nominee almost only included women and minority jurists, The Post reported.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a Black conservative, was later nominated to the court.
