California’s chief justice calls out Trump during annual speech

California Chief Justice took a few swipes during her annual State of the Judiciary speech Monday, March 19, 2018. California Chief Justice took a few swipes during her annual State of the Judiciary speech Monday, March 19, 2018. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close California’s chief justice calls out Trump during annual speech 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

California’s chief justice devoted much of her State of the Judiciary speech Monday to the state of the judiciary, its finances and the shortcomings of its bail system. But Tani Cantil-Sakauye also took a few swipes at fellow Republican, President Trump.

“At the national level, we are coping with unprecedented disruption, attacks on the free press, threats to civility, the Rule of Law, and judicial independence,” Cantil-Sakauye said in her eighth annual address to the Legislature since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated her to lead the state Supreme Court in 2010.

The nation’s founders, she observed, “built a federal system that still leaves the citizens of each state some ability to govern their own affairs.” And, she added, “California’s efforts to govern its own affairs (are) being tested now in our federal court system.”

That looked very much like a reference to the lawsuit Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed against California in a Sacramento federal court on March 6, accusing the state of violating U.S. immigration law with a series of recent statutes that limit local cooperation with federal immigration officers.

Among other things, the state laws bar local officers from informing federal agents about release dates or personal information of undocumented immigrants in local custody, except for those held on serious charges. One law requires employers to keep immigration officers out of private workplaces. Since the suit was filed in U.S. District Court, it’s unlikely to surface in the state courts that Cantil-Sakauye oversees.

The chief justice didn’t specify any particular attacks on the free press, civility or judicial independence. But Trump has assailed the news media as an “enemy of the American people” and denounced judges and courts that rule against him. He referred to one Republican-appointed jurist as a “so-called judge,” accused the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco of hostility, and griped that a fraud suit against Trump University had been assigned to a biased “Mexican” judge, who was actually the U.S.-born son of Mexican parents.

“As I observe the harsh rhetoric on the national stage, I am grateful for the leadership of our three branches of government here in California,” Cantil-Sakauye told the lawmakers.

Cantil-Sakauye, the child of Filipino-American farm workers, is a former prosecutor who was appointed to lower courts by two previous Republican governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, before Schwarzenegger chose her as the second woman to lead the state’s high court.

In Monday’s speech, she renewed her call for changing the bail system, which requires defendants to stay in jail until trial unless they can post cash bail in amounts based on the charges and their criminal record. A state appeals court has ruled the system unconstitutional and barred judges from setting bail at unaffordable levels unless a defendant poses a danger to the public or is likely to flee before trial. Legislation to overhaul the system is pending in Sacramento.

Cantil-Sakauye did not speak in detail about bail, referring instead to a report by a task force she appointed that recommended major changes. But she cited the late Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who told Congress in 1964 that the money bail system was “a vehicle for systematic injustice.”