Tipsheet

Trump Demands Ginsburg and Sotomayor Recuse Themselves from White House Cases

Cortney O'Brien
Cortney O'Brien  |  February 25, 2020 1:30 PM

President Trump suggested that two Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from any case involving his administration because they've exposed their political bias the past year.

First, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse herself because "she went wild during the campaign when I was running," Trump charged at a press conference in New Delhi, India on Tuesday.

"I don't know who she was for," he said. "Perhaps she was for Hillary Clinton, if you can believe it."

While Trump was campaigning for president, Ginsburg broke her associate justice protocol and publicly weighed in on the election.

"I can't imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as president," she said at the time. To another reporter, she called Trump a "faker."

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Even legal experts said her partisan comments went too far.

"She said some things that were obviously very inappropriate," Trump said on Tuesday. "She later sort of apologized. I wouldn't say it was an apology, but she sort of apologized."

Then there's Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented in Wolf vs. Cook County, a case which placed Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf against Cook County, IL over Trump's new "public charge" law. The new immigration policy places more restrictions on green card applications, allowing the government to deny applicants they foresee being economic burdens. The Court sided with the Trump administration. In her dissenting opinion, Sotomayor accused a few of her fellow justices of Trump bias because she sees a trend in which the Supreme Court helps out the White House when they receive a lower court ruling they don't like.

"Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each," Sotomayor wrote. "And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, its behavior relating to the public-charge rule in particular shows how much its own definition of irreparable harm has shifted. Having first sought a stay in the New York cases based, in large part, on the purported harm created by a nationwide injunction, it now disclaims that rationale and insists that the harm is its temporary inability to enforce its goals in one State. Second, this Court is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process. That is because the Court—in this case, the New York cases, and many others—has been all too quick to grant the Government’s “reflexiv[e]” requests. Ibid. But make no mistake: Such a shift in the Court’s own behavior comes at a cost."

"I just don't know how they cannot recuse themselves from anything having to do with Trump or Trump-related."

"It's almost what's she's trying to do is take the ppl that do feel a diff way and get them to vote the way that she would like them to do. I just thought it was inappropriate. such a terrible statement for a Supreme Court justice."

He shared the message for his Twitter audience too.