President Donald Trump has demanded that Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse themselves from future cases involving his administration after their dissent in last Friday's 5-4 ruling allowing the government to test prospective immigrants’ wealth.
“She said some things that were obviously inappropriate,” said the president, speaking Tuesday at a news conference in New Delhi, India, where he’s completing a two-day visit. “I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump-related,” Trump said.
The Trump administration's “wealth test” rules make it easier to deny immigrants residency or admission to the United States if they might depend on public-assistance programs.
Under the new policy, immigrants who are “likely at any time to become a public charge” because they may in the future need benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid or housing assistance may be turned away. It followed a ruling Jan. 27 that was already poised to take effect in 49 states.
Ginsburg voted with other liberal justices in the minority on the case but didn’t join Sotomayor’s fiery dissent, which attracted widespread attention on social media. The dissent, more or less, accuses the court’s conservative majority of accommodating the Trump administration when it comes to stays or injunctions that bypass the appeals process.
The ruling and Sotomayor’s blistering dissent lit up Twitter over the weekend.
In the dissent, Sotomayor went as far as to say that the practice is “putting a thumb on the scale in favor” of the party that won a stay — a pointed dig at the Trump administration and her conservative colleagues.
Sotomayor wrote that cases related to the Trump administration have been rushed through the court system without being “ventilated fully in the lower courts.”
“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” Sotomayor wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.”
In India, Trump also pointed to comments that Ginsburg made about him in 2016.
She came under fire for calling Trump, then a candidate for president, a “faker” during an interview with CNN.
"He has no consistency about him,” Ginsburg said at the time. "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," she told CNN.
Trump fired back on Twitter later the same night.
The next day Ginsburg said she regretted her remarks. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect," she said in a statement.
Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Sotomayor and Ginsburg in the minority opinion in Friday’s immigration ruling.
— This report was compiled by ArLuther Lee for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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