Trump's call for Sotomayor and Ginsburg recusals is 'step toward' defying Supreme Court: political analyst

The U.S. Supreme Court moved even further to the right when, in 2018, libertarian Justice Anthony Kennedy resigned and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Regardless, President Donald Trump believes that there is still too much liberalism on the High Court, calling for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor to recuse themselves from cases involving his administration — and CNN’s Ron Brownstein, on Twitter, warned that there will likely come a time when Trump defies a Supreme Court decision if he believes it is biased against him.

On February 24, Trump tweeted, “‘Sotomayor accuses GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump.’ @IngrahamAngle @FoxNews. This is a terrible thing to say. 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!”

In response, Brownstein tweeted, “Another step toward the perhaps inevitable moment when Trump, especially if he wins a second term, defies a #SCOTUS decision b/c Justices are ‘biased’ against him.”

Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, weighed in as well. Linking to Sotomayor’s dissent in the case Wolf v. Cook County, Vladeck tweeted, “Here’s Justice Sotomayor’s actual dissent, which accuses the majority of wrongly tipping the scales for emergency relief in favor of the federal government — not of pro-Trump bias. And as I’ve explained at length before, she’s right.”

John Fea, an historian at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, tweeted, “This is what it looks like when the President of the United States is held captive by a cable television network.”