Republican Cruz uses Senate perch to blast Supreme Court

“Much to my great disappointment, this past term the court crossed a line and continued its long dissent into lawlessness to a level I believe demands action”, he said during a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday. He says the U.S. Constitution didn’t legalize unnatural marriage – the Supreme Court did. But Cruz said that after the high court’s recent rulings, he had to act.

Before he was elected to the Senate in 2012, Cruz was a prominent lawyer who argued nine cases before the Supreme Court.

The court has tackled a number of highly divisive issues, including property rights, slavery, racial segregation and abortion. On Lochner, Cruz said he agreed with the policy outcome, but that the ruling had “no basis in the Constitution”. “Two undercover videos of Planned Parenthood show senior officials callously, heartlessly bargaining, haggling over the price of selling body parts of unborn children”.

John Eastman, law professor at Chapman University and chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, testified that the balance of power between the three branches of government has shifted and the federal judiciary is now “unchecked”.

Cruz is one of 16 candidates in the running to be the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

The irony of such prescriptions was undoubtedly not lost on many of those watching Wednesday’s hearing.

As it now stands, Supreme Court justices serve life terms, only ending upon death or impeachment by Congress. It would take a constitutional amendment to initiate term limits, but doing so would be hard due to the various political hurdles.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said he was “surprised” that Republicans were upset with what has been, on the whole, a conservative-leaning court. One, for instance, was the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which lifted limits on corporate and union expenditure in federal elections.