Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s public regret Thursday for her criticism of Donald Trump appears to derive from an effort to extract herself from the heat of the presidential election just as it is likely to get hotter with the upcoming Republican convention. I disagree. Unlike her feisty rulings and dissents, where she has forcefully defended her values, this kind of political statement is unlikely to do more than feed into Trump’s well-honed air of grievance and allow Republicans in Congress to stomp and complain and ignore their own intransigence in refusing to consider President Obama’s nomination to fill the empty seat.
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She later apologized Thursday for those remarks, saying they were “ill-advised”.
The Code of Conduct for USA judges says that they should not “make speeches for a political candidate, or publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office” or “engage in any other political activity”. “In the future I will be more circumspect”, Ginsburg, who is a member of the high court’s progressive wing, added in brief remarks distributed to the press by the Court.
Ginsburg said in an interview with CNN that Trump was a “faker” who she criticized as having no intellectual underpinning for his public statements.
Ginsburg drew widespread ire from Republicans for breaking with a code of conduct under which USA judges are not supposed to publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for office.
Analyst Steven Lubet believes that Justice Ginsburg chose the right path because it would let the Supreme Court to stay neutral in terms of electoral preference. While Ginsburg has resisted those calls, she has made clear in not so thinly veiled comments that she would prefer that her replacement be picked by a Democratic President, and preferably by a female Democratic President. In an editorial on Wednesday, the New York Times said that while there was no legal requirement for her to refrain from commenting on the presidential campaign, Ginsburg should uphold the court’s tradition of silence in political campaigns and drop the “punditry and name-calling”. The Supreme Court effectively decided the 2000 presidential race in Bush v. Gore.
Last week, Ginsburg crossed traditional lines of judicial restraint by publicly slamming Trump and what his possible presidency would mean for the court.
There was little precedent for Ginsburg’s comments.
Ginsburg, seen as a tough-as-nails figure, was appointed to the court in 1993 by then president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and is the darling of the progressive community in America, especially young people.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s indignant dissents from the bench have turned the 83-year-old veteran of the Supreme Court into a heroine of the left, beloved for methodically skewering her conservative colleagues.
