Donald Trump’s Response to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Barbs: ‘Resign!’
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Donald Trump late Tuesday called on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign, taking the clash between the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and a member of the Supreme Court further into uncharted territory.
Mr. Trump took to Twitter to respond to a series of highly unusual and escalating comments from Justice Ginsburg in which she suggested a Trump White House would be bad for the court and the nation.
“Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot – resign!,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night tweet.
While judges and justices normally steer clear of public comments about politics, Justice Ginsburg in three media interviews criticized Mr. Trump and his candidacy, culminating in comments CNN published Tuesday in which she called the mogul “a faker.”
Direct clashes between politicians and justices are exceedingly rare and perhaps unprecedented in the heat of a modern political campaign. The closest recent analogy may come from the 2010 State of the Union, when President Barack Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign finance ruling and said it could lead to foreign entities bankrolling American elections. Justice Samuel Alito, one of several justices in the audience, mouthed “Not true.”
The Ginsburg-Trump clash has sparked a debate about whether the expectations for judges should be different this time around, given the confrontational and controversial nature of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, which has included attacks on a federal judge’s impartiality based on his ethnicity.
“There is room to argue this is a unique kind of election,” said Indiana University law professor Charles Geyh, though he added that Justice Ginsburg’s comments were “more nakedly political than what I think the code of conduct contemplates.”
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