

Sometimes, when you’re Ted Cruz, you end up awkwardly watching hardcore porn with Supreme Court justices—as we learn from Cruz’s new book, A Time for Truth, where he recalls “gazing at explicit, hard-core pornography” with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist.



In a passage excerpted for Politico, Cruz describes how, while he was a 26-year-old clerk for Rehnquist, the Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to the constitutionality of a law regulating internet porn. The internet was “nascent technology,” so some librarians had to “demonstrate” to the blissfully-innocent justices just how easy it is for The Youths to stumble upon porn online.

I remember standing behind the computer, watching the librarian go to a search engine, turn off the filters, and type in the word cantaloupe, though misspelling it slightly. After she pressed “return,” a slew of hard-core, explicit images showed up on screen. Here I was, a 26-year-old man looking at explicit porn with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was standing alongside the colleague (my boss) she had once dated in law school. As we watched these graphic pictures fill our screens, wide-eyed, no one said a word. Except for Justice O’Connor, who lowered her head, squinted slightly, and muttered, “Oh, my.”



Cruz's book also contains some shade-throwing at Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and Karl Rove.