Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump demanded that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign on Wednesday morning, after she criticized him in harsh terms several times over the past several days.
Ginsburg told the Times on Sunday: “I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president.” She told the Associated Press last week: “I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs.” And she told a CNN reporter on Tuesday that Trump is a “faker.”
The New York Times published an editorial on Wednesday agreeing with Trump’s more tempered response on Tuesday, in which he called Justice Ginsburg’s remarks “inappropriate.” The Times wrote:
There is no legal requirement that Supreme Court justices refrain from commenting on a presidential campaign. But Justice Ginsburg’s comments show why their tradition has been to keep silent.
…
And just imagine if this were 2000 and the resolution of the election depended on a Supreme Court decision. Could anyone now argue with a straight face that Justice Ginsburg’s only guide would be the law?
Mr. Trump’s hands, of course, are far from clean on the matter of judicial independence. It was just weeks ago that he was lambasting Gonzalo Curiel, the United States District Court judge overseeing a case against Trump University, saying that as a “Mexican,” the Indiana-born judge could not be impartial.
All of which makes it only more baffling that Justice Ginsburg would choose to descend toward his level and call her own commitment to impartiality into question. Washington is more than partisan enough without the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice flinging herself into the mosh pit.
The Times editorial was published before Trump’s harsh response Wednesday morning.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.