US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, already facing criticism for her relatively mild comments that she cannot imagine what the country or the court might be like with Donald Trump as president, went even further with her critiques of the presumptive Republican nominee on Monday.
In an interview with CNN legal analyst and court biographer Joan Biskupic published on Tuesday, Ginsburg called Trump “a faker” whose candidacy she initially thought “funny”.
“He has no consistency about him,” she added. “He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.”
She also criticized the media for failing to scrutinize Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and for giving him “free publicity”.
Ginsburg’s latest broadside was published in the wake of Trump’s Tuesday response to her initial comments, which he called “highly inappropriate” and “beneath the court”.
“I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court,” Trump told the New York Times in a phone interview.
“And I would hope that she would get off the court as soon as possible,” he added.
Justices only leave the court if they retire, die in office or are impeached by the House of Representatives and then convicted by the US Senate.
The only justice to ever be impeached was Samuel Chase in 1805. Chase was accused by the House of acting in a politically partisan manner in two trials, as US supreme court justices also served as circuit court justices during the era; specifically, the prosecutors from the House claimed that Chase “behaved in an arbitrary, oppressive, and unjust way by announcing his legal interpretation on the law of treason before defense counsel had been heard.” He was eventually acquitted by the Senate.
The acquittal in the Chase impeachment trial, after which he remained on the bench, is generally seen as having cemented an independent federal judiciary against political interference by the legislative and executive branches.
Amanda Frost, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law, said Ginsburg’s comments: “I think it needlessly politicizes the court to see a sitting justice comment on presidential candidates,” pointing out that the justices generally even avoid clapping during the president’s State of the Union address.
“Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges states that a judge should not ‘publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office’”, she said. And, though she acknowledged that the code did not technically apply to the justices, she noted: “They have publicly stated they follow it, and its norms are ones they should follow.”
