“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them”, Ginsburg said in a statement issued on Thursday.
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While a position on the SCOTUS bench is normally marked by a conservative or liberal stance, the justices are normally expected to refrain from making politically biased comments, if only to protect the integrity of the court. Mr. Trump, she said, “says whatever comes into his head at the moment” and has no consistency in his thinking.
If there is a dispute over the upcoming election, the Supreme Court could get involved as it did during the 2000 election between eventual victor George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore.
But after days of political and media blowback, the reliably progressive justice issed a statement today critiquing her own her decision to make those comments publicly.
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 told the New York Times a Trump presidency would result in her moving to New Zealand. I’ve been a fan since I first met her in her Supreme Court chambers a decade ago, when she agreed to be a founding board member of a project I was running to better acquaint journalists with the U.S. Constitution.
The New York Times offered a similar editorial, saying, “Washington is more than partisan enough without the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice flinging herself into the mosh pit”. “Big mistake by an incompetent judge!” he said in a Wednesday tweet. I think he has gotten so much free publicity.
That time a Supreme Court justice went hunting with the VP: The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came under fire in 2004 after he went duck hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney in Louisiana – just weeks after the court said it would hear a case involving the vice president’s energy task force. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, appointed her. At the time, she was only the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s no secret that Supreme Court justices have their presidential preferences, but should they be talking about them out loud?
“He is a faker”, she said of Trump in her chambers. Beyond that, her commentary serves only to diminish the institution on which she serves.
Politics is tough, and there’s a reason justices don’t play the game very often.
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In 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall drew attention for comments in a television interview in which he criticized the civil-rights record of then President Ronald Reagan and said the California Republican was at “the bottom” compared with other presidents.
