Donald Trump early last week got into a verbal sparring match with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and while on paper, that may not look like a match that the Donald could win on merit, it turns out that he didn’t do too badly for himself.
It started when Ginsburg, a champion of liberal values on the bench, made some derogatory remarks regarding a Donald Trump Presidency.
In an interview with CNN, she had this to say.
“He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego… How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”
That’s likely where it would have ended had the press — and Donald Trump himself — not picked up those comments and ran with them.
The GOP frontrunner seized on the show of impartiality — something that Judges are supposed to have — and unleashed a response through (where else?) his Twitter account calling on Ginsburg to resign.
As many on the political left started issuing high-fives to one another with a “she told him!” bravado, some of the more thoughtful in the press really started to reject the remarks.
The New York Times hasn’t been the friendliest of papers to Donald Trump, yet it backed him, if not on his call for resignation, on his reasoning for asking for such.
In a shocking piece , entitled “Donald Trump Is Right About Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” the editorial board for NYT called on the Justice to “drop the political punditry.”
“Washington is more than partisan enough without the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice flinging herself into the mosh pit,” the Board wrote.
How Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on Donald Trump play right into his message https://t.co/OAs4wSNbUo pic.twitter.com/2fdXdvd3Dc
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 17, 2016
A similar lack of support from other news outlets caused Ginsburg to issue an apology later in the week, telling CNN that she regretted her remarks.
“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them,” Ginsburg said. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”
For many, the damage was already done, as it gave Trump ample ammunition to paint the left side of the Supreme Court as impartial in their decision-making.
While Democrats have heralded Ginsburg as a brilliant judicial mind, Republicans have often seen her as a partisan hack light on legal knowledge and heavy on activism.
The left, by the way, makes the same assessments of Justices Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia.
Regardless of who is right, Ginsburg has essentially given guys like Donald Trump the keys to the kingdom, retraction-or-not.
One of the big reasons that a Justice should remain impartial and not allow their feelings on a political candidate to show is that doing so delegitimizes their reasoning for whichever controversial decision comes across their desk.
Any time there is a clear conflict between enforcement of a law and the design of it, the nation depends on a Justice’s impartiality to interpret the law as it was meant to be interpreted.
Ginsburg’s overstepping of the boundaries in the election process proves her to be one who tries to write law from the bench rather than fulfill her role in government.
The fact Ginsburg has never sided against a liberal ideal on any contentious issue in her history on the bench had already made her qualifications for the U.S. Supreme Court suspect. Now that she has legitimized the right’s criticisms of her and paved the way for Donald Trump to continue his “rigged system” narrative, it’s time that she stepped down.
But what do you think, readers?
Ginsburg says she regrets comments on Trump https://t.co/XZxH9Eu8jl pic.twitter.com/wb6GXlatck
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) July 15, 2016
Is Donald Trump right in calling for her resignation, or should Justices be allowed to express their opinions on candidates for public office? Sound off in the comments section.
[Image via Wake Forest University | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ]
