Ted Cruz hit President Barack Obama multiple times on Thursday for planning to miss Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral, but the campaign says it hasn’t decided whether the Texas senator will attend the service Saturday himself.
Earlier on Thursday, Spokeswoman Alice Stewart told CNN that Cruz wanted to attend the funeral, but it will be “impossible” given his upcoming campaign schedule and Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina.
Later on Thursday, Stewart said a final decision had not yet been made. That said, attending would require a massive shift to their Saturday campaign schedule, which has not yet been publicly released.
Speaking to the Granville County Republican Women at a luncheon in Greenville, Cruz characterized Obama as a “lawless and faithless President who’s eager to travel to Cuba, but unwilling to attend the funeral of Justice Scalia.”
Later, at Mutt’s Barbecue in Easley, Cruz again hit Obama for not planning to go to the funeral, and for not attending Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013.
Cruz, a Supreme Court clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist in the mid-1990s, said he knew Scalia “personally” for 20 years, and argued before him on the Supreme Court nine times.
“Justice Scalia was a lion of the law. He was someone I knew for 20 years. He was brilliant, principled. Like Ronald Reagan was to the presidency, so Justice Scalia was to the Supreme Court. And his passing leaves a huge void on that court,” he told Anderson Cooper at CNN’s Town Hall on Thursday.