Chief Justice Roberts Delivers Historic Rebuke to President Trump
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on this day delivered a historic rebuke to President Donald J. Trump.
The day before, Trump made a sharp partisan criticism of both the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a U.S. District Court judge in California who had just ruled against the Trump administration in a case involving the granting of asylum to refugees arriving in the U.S. Trump attacked Judge John Tigar as “an Obama judge.” He then delivered a rant against the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (in whose jurisdiction Judge Tigar functions), call it a “disgrace” and vowing that “it’s not going to happen like this anymore.” He also talked about “breaking up” the Ninth Circuit into two or three separate districts.
In rare step, for which there is no known precedent for a Chief Justice, Roberts stated that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” referring to the four previous presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans. “What we have,” Roberts continued, “is an extraordinary group of dedicated justices doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
In the past, presidents have at times criticized the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, but no president has ever attacked the courts on such partisan terms as Trump has done since taking office. In early 2017, in he first federal court decision on Trump’s ban in travel to the U.S., which ruled against his police, Trump attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel as a “so-called judge,” and suggested that he might be biased against the administration’s immigration policy because of his Mexican heritage.
Chief Justice Roberts added, on the day before Thanksgiving, that “an independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Critics of President Trump argue that his attacks on an independent judiciary, along with his frequent attack on the news media, constitute a serious threat to the fundamentals of American democracy.
Read: Joan Biskupic, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts (2019)
And also read: Joan Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America (2020)