TRUMP CALLS
Ginsburg, Sotomayor biased against him, he maintains
on Sotomayor, Ginsberg to recuse in cases related to him.
President Donald Trump was critical of Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a pair of tweets and at a news conference in India on Tuesday, days after Sotomayor issued a dissenting opinion of the Trump administration’s legal strategy and the court’s majority for enabling it.
Tweeting just before appearing in a welcome ceremony at the Indian ceremonial president’s residence in New Delhi, Trump cited a Laura Ingraham segment on Fox News titled, “Sotomayor accuses GOP-appointed justices of being biased in favor of Trump.” He then called on Sotomayor and Ginsburg to recuse themselves in “all Trump, or Trump-related, matters!”
“Trying to ‘shame’ some into voting her way?” Trump said of Sotomayor. “She never criticized Justice Ginsberg when she called me a ‘faker’. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump-related matters! While ‘elections have consequences’, I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States Supreme Court!”
He continued his criticism during a news conference Tuesday in New Delhi.
“I always thought, frankly, that Justice Ginsburg should do it, because she went wild during the campaign when I was running,” he said. “I don’t know who she was for — perhaps she was for Hillary Clinton, if you can believe it — but she said some things that were obviously very inappropriate.
“She later sort of apologized. I wouldn’t say it was an apology, but she sort of apologized. And then Justice Sotomayor said what she said yesterday: You know very well what she said yesterday. It was a big story. And I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything having to do with Trump or Trump-related.”
His tweet directed at Ginsburg stems from July 2016 comments Ginsburg made about then-presidential candidate Trump, calling him a “faker” who “says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”
As for Sotomayor, Trump was referring to a dissent she wrote last week after the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, allowed the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule to go into effect. The immigration policy denies green cards to immigrants likely to rely on public benefits to support themselves or their families.
On Friday, the conservative justices on the court granted the administration’s emergency application to halt a lower court’s ruling temporarily blocking the “public charge” rule from going into effect in Illinois.
Sotomayor’s chief complaint was that the Supreme Court has been too quick to grant “emergency” relief to the federal government in numerous cases — even though the government presents almost no convincing evidence of an emergency.
“It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it,” Sotomayor wrote.
The government has “leapfrogged” over lower courts to appeal to the Supreme Court on a few occasions to block adverse rulings before they are fully litigated.
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, called attention to the pattern of behavior that Sotomayor was criticizing in a November paper in the Harvard Law Review. He found that Trump’s solicitor general sought emergency stays in 20 cases in the first 2½ years of Trump’s term, including six to stop nationwide injunctions against Trump’s travel ban and three involving the transgender military ban.
By comparison, in all 16 years of the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, the solicitor general filed eight stay applications.
“A majority of the Justices now appear to believe that the government suffers an irreparable injury for purposes of emergency relief whenever a statute or policy is enjoined by a lower court, regardless of the actual impact of the lower court’s ruling,” Vladeck argued.
In the case at hand, the alleged “irreparable harm” for the federal government was that it could not implement its new “public charge” rule in a single state, Illinois.
For the past 20 years, the government defined “public charge” as a person who is “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.” The new definition of “public charge,” however, is “an alien who receives one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months in the aggregate within any 36-month period” — including benefits such as food stamps and most forms of Medicaid.
What is the alleged “irreparable harm,” Sotomayor questioned, of allowing the 20-year status quo to continue in a single state?
“In sum, the Government’s only claimed hardship is that it must enforce an existing interpretation of an immigration rule in one State — just as it has done for the past 20 years — while an updated version of the rule takes effect in the remaining 49,” she wrote.