Ginsburg has taken to criticizing the presumptive Republican nominee in recent days, saying she doesn’t even “want to contemplate” the effects a Trump candidacy would have on the Supreme Court.
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The BBC, to my knowledge, the first to report the brewing scandal, call it a “political row”, and reported Donald Trump’s call for her resignation: “Justice Ginsburg…has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me”.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have skewered Ginsburg, with The Times publishing an editorial Wednesday declaring Trump “right” in the war of words.
In one corner, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the long-serving top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Ginsburg should “absolutely not” apologize to Trump but acknowledged that her disapproval would present a potential problem in a Trump administration.
Her comments were met with a wave of alarm by many judicial ethics experts, who called them surprising if not potentially recusal-worthy should a legal issue involving Trump come before the court. “As a lawyer and as a citizen, I’d always rather know what justices and judges think rather than have enforced silence and pretend they have no views”, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Irvine School of Law, wrote Tuesday on The New York Times’ Room for Debate blog. “I do not believe anything that comes out of his mouth”.
It is exceptional for a US Supreme Court justice to speak openly about politics and their political preferences. “Her mind is shot – resign!” he declared.
Perhaps, New Zealand would grant her legal immigrant status should she decide to embrace her late husband’s comments and leave the United States.
Why the Senate? Ginsburg plainly cannot understand how Republicans can get away with not acting on President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, federal appellate judge Merrick Garland.
Ginsburg’s opinions are often at odds with those stated by Trump and other conservatives.
Ginsburg is among the liberals on the court, which has been ideologically split between four liberals and four conservatives since conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died in February.
Ginsburg was not immediately available for comment on Trump’s remarks and the editorial.
Clearly, they feel that Ginsburg’s senior moment has impugned her judgement at a time when they can nearly taste a statist victory.
Ginsburg told the Associated Press she did not want to think about the possibility of Trump winning the election. She had made the comments prior learning of the Florida “recount” in a state in which Jeb Bush was governor and the case ended up before the Court. That makes it vital that the court remain outside the presidential process.
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“I find it very peculiar, and I think it’s out of place”, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, told CNN. “I think that’s something that she should not have done because I don’t think that that shows that she intends on being impartial in the future”.
