Trump opens the door to nominating Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court if there is a vacancy in two years

Donald Trump promises at a rally in Texas to nominate Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court if there is a vacancy in two years.

A verbal announcement, without an open procedure and with three previous ‘no’s

The setting was a rally in Lubbockin the Republican heart of Texas, on a Tuesday night and five days before the November 3 midterm elections. There, in front of thousands of supporters and with Ted Cruz sitting next to him, president of the United States He turned to the senator, played with the idea and blurted it out: ‘I shouldn’t tell this. Shall I tell you, about the situation of the Supreme Court?’

The answer he gave later explains the joke and, incidentally, the relationship between the two. Trump assured that the Democrats would vote ‘100%’ in favor because they ‘hate the guy’ and want to get rid of him in the Senate, and that the Republicans would do the same ‘100%’ because ‘they can’t stand him.’ ‘They would love to get rid of him. So he would have 100% of the votes, and he would be a Supreme Court judge, and he would do an excellent job,’ he concluded. Footage of the event shows Cruz laughing and nodding his head.

It is worth clarifying the premise, because that premise expired years ago. Since April 2017, when Republicans activated the call nuclear option (the parliamentary maneuver that lowers the voting threshold for judicial appointments), a Supreme Court judge no longer needs 60 votes in the Senate: a simple majority of 51 is enough. The joke about Democratic votes is a rhetorical device, not actual arithmetic.

The fact that really matters is another: Cruz has already said ‘no’ three times. It happened during the first term, when the White House looked for candidates for the vacancies left by Antonin Scalia (2016), Anthony Kennedy (2018) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2020), and which ended in Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The Texas senator told it to the Wall Street Journal: ‘In Trump’s first term, the president spoke to me seriously about the three vacancies, and I said no three times because I don’t want to be out of the arena of political battle.’

That calculation still stands and orders everything else. Cruz has been in the Senate since 2013, he revalidated his seat in November 2024 and his term does not expire until January 2031. Changing him for a lifetime toga means resigning from the commissions, the legislative fray and the presidential primaries that he already contested in 2016. It is not an obvious promotion: it is a withdrawal, and he has described it with those words. In parallel, the clock is ticking: the judge Samuel Alito76, has declared that he could consider leaving next year, with the warning that political circumstances rule. If the session closes, the nomination would arrive in the summer of 2027 and would be the first gap in the Supreme Court in Trump’s second term.

Washington has been appointing judges for decades with the same logic: the best jurist is not chosen, the judge who survives the Senate is chosen.

What is at stake for Spain when a chair moves in the American Supreme Court?

The connection is not abstract. The US Supreme Court decides the regulatory perimeter within which Spanish companies with a presence in the country operate: Santander and BBVA in consumer financing and contractual arbitration, Iberdrola and Repsol in energy and climate litigation, Ferrovial and ACS in public procurement, Telephone and Inditex in regulatory compliance and labor rights. Since the Supreme Court buried the doctrine of deference to federal agencies in 2024, each interpretation of a trade law or a tax statute depends more on the court and less on the official on duty.

That’s why the profile matters. A Judge Cruz would be a textbook originalist, trained at Harvard, with clerkship with the president of the Court William Rehnquist and with a defense of administrative due process that he has taken to the bench: in 2008 he argued and won Medellin vs. Texas before the Supreme Court itself. For Spanish companies, this translates into more litigation and less interpretative margin for the agencies, something that is already noticeable in disputes over tariffs and state climate regulations.

There is a second level, less legal and more political. Cruz has been one of the voices in the Senate that has most insisted on demanding that European allies make more efforts in defense, a flag that directly interests Madrid within NATO. His arrival at the Supreme Court, in any case, would remove him from the legislative debate: whoever today pressures from the bench would decide without giving an opinion.

Washington Logic

Why launch this at a rally and not in a statement? Because the judicial nomination has been, for four decades, the glue of the Republican coalition. It unites evangelicals, libertarian donors, the network of federalist jurists and the middle-class voter who sees the Court as their last guarantee. Trump understood it in 2016 and made it profitable like no one else: three appointments in four years are his most lasting legacy, the one that no subsequent law can repeal. Five days before a midterm election, that message is worth more than any employment figure.

The precedent is at hand. In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan promised that he would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court and he delivered in 1981 with Sandra Day O’Connor. The advance announcement was not propaganda: it served to set expectations and commit a base that distrusted the candidate. Trump is now doing the same with his own name, which adds an electoral incentive in Texas and a warning to the rest of the senators: the judicial project continues, with or without them. The warning has a cost. Eisenhower called Earl Warren’s appointment ‘the worst mistake of my life,’ and history reminds us that a judge surprises his appointee more often than he admits.

For Spain, the useful reading is not who sits in the chair, but how they sit. A more restrictive Supreme Court with federal agencies favors business litigation and dismantles the administrative predictability that Spanish multinationals have used to plan ten-year investments. The question is twofold: whether Alito really leaves and whether Cruz, who has said ‘no’ three times, maintains the fourth ‘yes’ when the White House sends the name to the Senate. The window starts on November 3 with the elections and will close, at the latest, in the summer of 2027.

Case File

• The case: Trump announces at a rally in Lubbock, Texas, that he would nominate Senator Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court if a vacancy opens up in the next two years. It is a verbal declaration, without formal procedure.
• Key data: Cruz is 55 years old, he has been a senator since 2013 and his seat expires in January 2031. Samuel Alito is 76 years old. Since 2017, the confirmation of a Supreme Court judge requires 51 votes, not 60.
• For Spain: The composition of the Supreme Court defines the regulatory framework of Santander, BBVA, Iberdrola, Repsol, Ferrovial, ACS, Telefónica and Inditex in the US. The decision is negotiated in the Senate, not in Madrid or Brussels.