President Donald Trump got some huge news on Monday. After meeting resistance from several liberal courts around the country, the president finally had the block on his travel ban lifted – partially – by the Supreme Court. That doesn’t mean the court has overruled the lower judiciary; it merely means they will allow the ban to go into effect until they can visit the case in full after the summer break. Of course, considering that the ban was only meant to last 90 to 120 days in the first place, that should give the national security team a decent amount of time to improve the vetting procedures.
When the case DOES come before the Supreme Court, however, there is one Justice who has no business on the bench. This week, fifty-eight House Republicans sent a letter to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, demanding that she recuse herself from the case based on her prior public comments about President Trump.
Last summer, Ginsburg made several remarks about the then-Republican nominee that even struck some liberal observers as inappropriate.
“I can’t imagine what this place would be – I can’t imagine what the country would be – with Donald Trump as our president,” she told the New York Times in July.
A few days later, in an interview with CNN, she said of Trump: “He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”
In the interviews, she suggested that she and her husband might have to flee the country if Trump were to actually win the election.
Apparently she’s decided against that rash reaction, but Republicans say her remarks make her unfit to rule on the travel ban case.
“You are bound by law to recuse yourself from participation in this case,” the congressmen write. “There is no doubt that your impartiality can be reasonably questioned; indeed, it would be unreasonable not to question your impartiality. Your participation in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project would violate the law and undermine the credibility of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
This is not really a gray area. Ginsburg is ethically and LEGALLY compelled to recuse herself from this and any other case directly involving President Trump. That’s the tar pit she gleefully threw herself into when she decided to “go rogue” last summer, confident as she no doubt was that her girl Hillary would win the election. Well, no backsies, Mrs. Ginsburg. You made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it. And if the court won’t have the benefit of your predictable decision in this case, so much the better for our country, our executive branch, and our national security.
