‘Odds are very good’ of Supreme Court vacancy this summer

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told “Special Report with Bret Baier” Thursday that “I think the odds are very good” that a second seat on the Supreme Court will fall vacant this year.

“If not this summer, next summer,” Cruz told Bret Baier. “You know, judges don’t like it when people kind of nudge them out, so they’ll go when they decide to go.”

Cruz stressed that he had “no inside information” about any possible vacancy, but noted that “that most of my professional career has been as a Supreme Court litigator and I know the Court well.”

President Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last year at the age of 79. Cruz did not specify which justice he believed would retire, but two of the remaining eight justices on the court — liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg and swing vote Anthony Kennedy — are in their 80s.

Cruz said the battle over whoever is appointed to fill the forthcoming vacancy would be “Armageddon.”

“[This] is going to be the opportunity to shift the course of this court [and] put a five-justice majority of Constitutionalists on the court,” Cruz said, adding that Republicans “need to be prepared to take the case to the American people.”

Cruz, who has been put forward as a potential Supreme Court candidate, told Baier that he was “very happy in the Senate.”

The senator also had harsh words for Washington Democrats, saying that many are “out of their minds.”

“They’re really angry. They’re angry not at Republicans, not even at Trump. They’re angry at the American people. They’re angry at the voters: ‘How dare you elect a Republican president and Republican majorities in both houses?’” Cruz said. “The Democrats are not in the mode of raising reasonable questions. They’re in the mode of losing their minds, of screaming – it’s not showing respect for the democratic process, it’s not showing respect for the voters. I think that’s unfortunate.