July 5, 2018

One of Trump’s Potential SCOTUS Nominees Sent a Tweet He Probably Really Regrets

He’s known in Texas as “the Tweeter Laureate.”

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Only one person on President Donald Trump’s short list to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is on record with his support for a “constitutional right to marry bacon.”

That man is 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Don R. Willett, who wrote this tweet as a way to assert his opposition two months before the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Dubbed the “Tweeter Laureate” by the Texas House of Representatives during his 12-year stint as a justice on the state’s high court, Willett describes himself as an “Extravagantly blessed husband.” But one tweet in his over 25,000 tweets about food, sports, and the exploits of the three children he calls the “3 wee Willetts” might come back to haunt him.

A former “rodeo bull rider” who once called himself the “most conservative” justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Willett won fame in the Lone Star State for his outspoken defense of right-wing values and his activist approach to jurisprudence. “I oppose judicial activism, inventing rights not rooted in the law,” he once wrote. “But the opposite extreme, judicial passivism, is corrosive, too—judges who, while not activist, are not active in preserving the liberties, and the limits, our Framers actually enshrined.”

His staunch conservatism did not go unnoticed, and in October 2017, Trump tapped him to join the 5th Circuit, a designation this bow-tie-wearing jurist said he was “honored and humbled” to receive. But during the 2016 presidential campaign, Willett did not act as if he would ever consider Trump his commander in chief, much less the person who might consider him for a Supreme Court appointment.

There was the time he mocked Trump’s appeal to evangelical voters.

Or the many, many jabs he took at Trump University’s expense.

But the one tweet Willett probably wishes he could take back concerned Trump’s potential choice of a Supreme Court justice. Like a true Twitter Laureate, he delivered it in the form of a haiku:

Perhaps it is no surprise the White House reportedly told Willett after his nomination to the 5th Circuit to “take his Twitter account down & behave himself.” That exile lasted just shy of 48 days. Soon enough, @JusticeWillett was back to his 113,000 followers but restricted his tweets to 8 Mile memes and a shout-out to Texas-shaped corn bread.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate