WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves from any cases involving him. The tweet appeared to be in response to something he may have seen on Fox News.
On his second day in India, Trump tweeted a quote of something he appears to have seen on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News Channel.
"Sotomayor accuses GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump," the president tweeted, tagging Fox and Ingraham. "This is a terrible thing to say. Trying to 'shame' some into voting her way? 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!"
The New York Times reports Trump may have been referring to something Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion when the court allowed the Trump administration to go forward with denying green cards to immigrants who are deemed to likely be reliant on government aid programs.
Sotomayor's dissent said the administration has gotten into the habit of going straight to the Supreme Court after losing in lower courts, "Claiming one emergency after another," thereby consuming the court's resources. She said each time the administration has declared an emergency, the urgency becomes more hollow.
The Times reports Sotomayor did not overtly accuse Republican-appointed justices of being biased in favor of Trump. But she did reportedly write that decisions on stay applications have benefited the Trump administration over all others.
As for the "faker" comment, the Times reports it's something Ginsburg called Trump during the 2016 campaign. She said she could not imagine him becoming president. She later said her remarks were "ill advised."
The recusal demand from Trump is likely to increase recent concerns that he is trying to blur the lines between the three co-equal branches of government, particularly in cases of interest to him. Trump has attacked prosecutors, the judge, and jurors in the case of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was sentenced last week to 40 months in prison. That led nearly 2,700 former federal prosecutors and others in the legal profession to demand Attorney General William Barr resign and for Justice Department officials to stand firm against any orders that may go against their oaths of office.