U.S. Senator Ted Cruz wasn’t able to come up with an actual answer when asked about President Trump’s claim earlier Monday that he can pardon himself. Cruz is a Republican from Texas who ran for the White House as the anti-Trump but in a remarkable transformation just two years later is running for re-election to the Senate as a forever-Trumper.
“Senator, the president says he can pardon himself. Would you agree with that?” a reporter asked Cruz while on Capitol Hill Monday afternoon.
In audio posted by the reporter, Haley Byrd of the conservative news site The Weekly Standard, nothing but silence and footsteps ticking off like a metronome can be heard until a second reporter asks the question again. About 18 seconds pass between the first time the question is asked and when Cruz answers.
Cruz is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he also served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton, where he wrote his thesis on curtailing the abuses of federal power.
In the very first pages of that thesis Cruz quotes James Madison, who he says wrote that “you must…oblige” the government “to control itself.”
Back to Cruz asking if President Trump has the constitutional authority to pardon himself.
After those 18 or so seconds, and being asked twice, Cruz responds: “That is not a Constitutional issue I’ve studied, so, I will withhold judgment.”
Listen:
Cruz also sits on the Board of Advisors of the Texas Review of Law and Politics. He was the major force in getting campaign funding fraud felon Dinesh D’Souza his president pardon.
(Fun fact: Cruz wrote his thesis for Professor Robert George, the co-founder of NOM, the National Organization For Marriage.)