Trump hits back at Supreme Court criticisms

Donald Trump has taken the unusual step of attacking two Supreme Court justices on Twitter and in remarks to the press. According to a report in The Guardian, in a dissent last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticised the Trump administration’s frequent appeals to the Supreme Court to intervene in lower-court decisions, and the court’s willingness to side with such requests. On Twitter, responding to a segment on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Trump unleashed a tirade against Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has criticised the President in the past. ‘This is a terrible thing to say,’ Trump tweeted. ‘Trying to “shame” some into voting her way? She never criticised Justice Ginsberg when she called me a “faker”. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!’ The attacks on two of the four women ever to serve on the Supreme Court, including its first Latina, landed as the lens tightens on the President’s interference in the courts system. This month, Attorney-General William Barr publicly criticised Trump’s tweeting on Justice Department matters and reportedly said he was considering quitting after Trump failed to heed his warning to stop. Sotomayor’s dissent did not mention Trump or accuse the courts of a pro-Trump bias. It depicted accurately how the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in cases playing out in lower courts at a higher rate than George W Bush and Barack Obama combined. ‘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.’