Ginsburg told The New York Times that she couldn’t imagine what the country would be like with Trump as president.
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The New York Times and Washington Post joined in the rebukes, with the Times asking her to uphold the court’s tradition of silence in political campaigns and drop the “punditry and name-calling”.
Calling him a “faker,” and suggesting he’s an out-of-control egomaniac, Ginsburg concluded by saying “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president”.
Trump called her comments “highly inappropriate”, as did legal analysts who cited normal strictures against judges offering their opinions about political candidates.
“For her to come out and to say the kind of things there is nearly something wrong with her. I don’t think anyone has ever seen that before”, Trump said.
It is pretty much unheard of for a US Supreme Court justice to speak openly about politics.
The business mongul tweeted early this morning that Ginsburg’s “mind is shot” and should “resign”.
The next president is likely to have other opportunities to shape the court as aging justices retire or die.
In 1800 for example, according to a POLITICO magazine report, so many justices of the Court were campaigning for John Adams that election year that it forced a delay in the court term. “That shows bias to me”, Ryan said during a CNN town hall.
The unusual and apparently unprecedented battle of words between a justice of the Supreme Court and a presumptive presidential nominee continued Tuesday. We should keep in mind that many liberals, conservatives and libertarians are united in being concerned with Trump’s candidacy on this score.
“I’m not going to comment on what any of the eight Supreme Court justices say”, he told reporters.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary panel, said: “I guess (Trump) was upset because she pointed out that he lied about disclosing his tax returns”. The reason? She made “very dumb political statements” about Trump.
The Times scolded the liberal justice Wednesday in an editorial and called her impartiality into question.
As Trump put it, “It’s so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that”. It’s their job, he said, “to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat”. Ginsburg’s comments could compel conservatives to coalesce behind Trump at a time when he is struggling to unify the party – just one week before his nominating convention in Cleveland. And Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was “totally inappropriate” for Ginsburg to criticize Trump.
“Even if it were unenforceable, a code would at least formalize public expectations for the justices’ conduct”, legal scholar Steven Lubet wrote on the website Legal Ethics Forum.
On a lighter note, he joked: “She didn’t earn the nickname the Notorious RBG for nothing”.
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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told CNN on Tuesday it’s “very peculiar” and “out of place”.
