Ted Cruz, doing his TV evangelist impression
Ted Cruz will not be surpassed in extremism in this presidential campaign. He sure won't be outdone in
bigoted fervor to keep lesbian and gay Americans second-class citizens.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa – On his first Iowa stop as a presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz warned Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling to legalize gay marriage nationwide would be "fundamentally illegitimate." […]
He reiterated his vow to press for a constitutional amendment that would clarify the power of state legislatures to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. If the high court does legalize gay marriage nationwide, he added, he would prod Congress to strip federal courts of jurisdiction over the issue, a rarely invoked legislative tool.
"If the court tries to do this it will be rampant judicial activism. It will be lawlessness, it will be fundamentally illegitimate," he said.
"Is that a thing?" you might ask. Yes,
it's a thing. There is precedent for Congress to attempt to remove courts' power to hear cases, and has been deployed in the past for any number of reactionary social issues, without success. There is a "plausible legal argument supporting such proposals," Ian Milhiser says, because the "Constitution provides that '[t]he judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.'" Federal courts are created by Congress and so it's not out of the realm of constitutional possibility that Congress could have some say in the scope of cases they hear. The Supreme Court's a little different, but there's an Article III argument that the phrase "the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make" means there are exceptions allowing Congress to keep them from hearing some cases.
Nonetheless, it's kind of an extreme solution to what Cruz sees as a problem—the inexorable march of progress. Kind of a "nuclear option," calling for a potential constitutional crisis in the cause of discrimination.