As part of a continuing effort to draw hesitant Republicans’ focus to Supreme Court appointments likely up for grabs for the next president, Donald Trump on Friday unveiled another list of names of people he would consider for the court.
The list included Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who fought tooth and nail to block Trump from securing the party’s nomination.
The list of ten names, which comes after the campaign put out a list of 11 possible nominees in May, includes three federal appeals court judges, two federal district court judges and four state supreme court judges, along with Lee.
One notable omission was the billionaire Peter Thiel, who made headlines for bankrolling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media. Sources close to Trump had said he wanted Thiel on the high court, according to the Huffington Post.
The original list included Lee’s brother, Thomas Lee, a state judge in Utah, in what was an attempt to appeal to some of the Republican Party’s most conservative holdouts, like Lee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
In a recent interview with conservative media, Lee unloaded on his objections to endorsing Trump, reminding an interviewer that the GOP nominee had linked Cruz’s father to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee said, as quoted by Politico. “We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”
Lee went on to say while hope isn’t lost that he could still endorse Trump, he needs to hear “the right things out of him” before throwing his support behind a candidate he once said “scares me to to death.”
Here’s the full list of Trump’s proposed justices, via the Wall Street Journal:
Mike Lee, Utah senator
Neil Gorsuch, 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
Margaret A. Ryan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
Edward Mansfield, Iowa Supreme Court
Keith Blackwell, Georgia Supreme Court
Charles Canady, Florida Supreme Court
Timothy Tymkovich, 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
Amul Thapar, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky
Federico Moreno, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Robert Young, Chief Justice, Michigan Supreme Court
This post has been updated.
