Trump, Roberts in Supreme tiff
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the Republican-appointed head of the federal judiciary, learned yesterday that he is not exempt from the president’s Twitter ire.
The extraordinary inner-branch public spat broke out after Roberts made the rare move of publicly rebuking comments President Trump made disparaging West Coast federal judges as politically-biased adversaries.
After San Francisco-based Judge Jon S. Tigar temporarily blocked Trump’s bid to crack down on asylum requests at the southern border, Trump called him “an Obama Judge” and decried the appellate court that hears claims out of California and other Western states as “a disgrace.”
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement responding to an Associated Press inquiry. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Roberts ended his day-before-Thanksgiving statement: “That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Trump shot back on Twitter.
“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country,” he tweeted.
Trump also advised Roberts, who also serves as the head of the chief administrative body of the federal judiciary, to “study the numbers, they are shocking.”
Trump goes on to correctly note that about 79 percent of rulings of the 9th Circuit — which has the reputation of being liberal-leaning — are reversed by the high court. But he failed to mention that two other circuits, both made up entirely of states that went to Trump in the 2016 election, have higher rates of reversal.
The 6th circuit, which covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, has been reversed 87 percent of the time since 2010, and the 11th circuit, consisting of Florida, Georgia and Alabama, has had 85 percent of its rulings flipped.
The war of words also comes as the fate of a host of Trump administration policies rest with the very federal judges at whom Trump is taking aim.
For his sake, he should hope that Roberts is exactly right about the “independent judiciary,” and be thankful that their charge is to consider the rule of law, and not the words that Trump has used against them.