Alfano, who far more than past Philadelphia bar chancellors has chosen to take positions on high profile legal and political issues, said the ethics rules that bar lower court judges from participating in partisan political debates should apply as well to members of the Supreme Court.
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Justices are supposed to be above politics and political scandals, and, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion, when it comes to political prejudices. In subsequent tweets, he called Ms Ginsburg “incompetent” and wondered whether she would apologise.
“He has no consistency about him”, she said.
It also came at a dramatic moment in the presidential campaign, with Mr. Trump preparing to name his vice-presidential pick on Friday and then, next week, formally accept the Republican party’s nomination. “He really has an ego”, she told CNN. She added, “For the country, it could be four years”.
“I don’t want it to spill over and affect us”, he said. Two other justices in their late 70s, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy, also could retire in the next few years.
The comments raised the question of whether she could remain fair if the court were asked to hear a case involving Trump, especially one over the outcome of the election as in 2000.
Ginsburg said in an interview with CNN that Trump was a “faker” who she criticized as having no intellectual underpinning for his public statements.
For Trump, selecting Pence would be a sharp departure from habit, and the surest sign yet that he intends to submit to at least some standard political pressures in the general election. She had quipped to the New York Times about moving to New Zealand if he won. When a Supreme Court justice announces her contempt for a presidential candidate, she places in jeopardy any pretension of fairness toward that candidate’s administration, should he win. The code doesn’t apply to the Supreme Court, but the justices generally are guided by it. This is not a matter for impeachment. I suppose it will in the sense that her political views are no longer just a subtext of her long career on the Court.
US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been forced to make an apology for comments she made on three separate occasions last week.
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Following an unprecedented war of words with Donald Trump, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Thursday expressed “regret” for her public criticisms of his candidacy.
