This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

Even as the US justice system faces a crisis of credibility because of the Trump administration’s handling of federal cases, Donald Trump has taken the unusual step of attacking two supreme court justices on Twitter and in remarks to the press.

Trump's dark legacy: a US judiciary remade in his own image Read more

In a dissent last week, justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized 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’s The Ingraham Angle, Trump unleashed a tirade against Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has criticized the president in the past.

“This is a terrible thing to say,” Trump tweeted. “Trying to ‘shame’ some into voting her way? She never criticized Justice Ginsberg when she called me a ‘faker’. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!

“While ‘elections have consequences’” – a reference to his two supreme court appointments since winning the White House, both reliable conservatives – “I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States supreme court!”

At a press conference in India on Tuesday, Trump repeated his complaint.

“I just don’t know how they can not recuse themselves from anything having to do with Trump or Trump-related,” he said. “The right thing to do is that.

“What Justice Sotomayor said … was really highly inappropriate and everybody agrees to that. Virtually everybody. I’ve seen papers on it, people cannot believe that she said it.”

He said: “She’s trying to shame people with perhaps a different view into voting her way.”

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 criticized Trump’s tweeting on justice department matters and reportedly said he was considering quitting after Trump failed to heed his warning to stop.

At the same time, more than 2,600 former US justice department officials called on Barr to step down for “doing the president’s personal bidding” in imposing a recommendation of a reduced sentence for Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the president.

It would be exceptional for any supreme court justice to recuse themselves from all cases involving the White House.

Sotomayor’s dissent was written in the style justices use after losing a divided ruling and 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.”

Sotomayor was critical of the court allowing this to happen, and wrote that such interventions usually fall in the Trump administration’s favor.

The president’s call for Ginsburg to recuse appeared to stem from her criticism of him during the 2016 election. In July that year, Ginsburg said she could not “imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president” and called him a “faker”.

Ginsburg has said she regrets the comments, as “judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office”.

“In the future I will be more circumspect,” she said.

In November 2018, Trump’s relentless focus on the courts prompted supreme court chief justice John Roberts to intervene. After Trump said a federal judge was biased because of the president who appointed him, Roberts denied the assertion.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” said the conservative appointed by George W Bush in 2005. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump ignored the rebuke.