Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.
No big surprise here. Two appointed by Barry, two by Clinton.
But I'm here to address the witch without a broom on the right. This is what she said about Trump before the election and made no bones about it.
"I can't imagine what this place would be -- I can't imagine what the country would be -- with Donald Trump as our president,"
"He is a faker," she said of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, going point by point as if presenting a legal brief. "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that."
My initial reaction was she should have been fired on the spot. Then I discovered this:
No federal judge can be “fired” in the conventional sense. They can only be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate for whatever Congress determines to be “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
It is interesting, though, to speculate about how an unsatisfactory Supreme Court justice might be pressured to resign. Because they have life tenure, some justices become mentally unclear, (Ginsburg to a tee) and others physically can no longer handle the demanding workload. (Ginsburg makes Anthony Bourdain look energetic). Traditionally, some of the other justices take it upon themselves to speak to the underperforming justice when it gets bad enough. First, they drop hints, then they say it outright: you need to stand down.
So when is this event going to take place?
Does anyone in their right mind truly believe she would ever rule in favor of Trump?
Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot - resign!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2016
Keep this in mind. If Trump does 8 he'll get at least two more. No way
Ginsburg is going to make 2024 and Stephens is already talking about retirement.
Update:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire - letting Trump pick ANOTHER conservative justice to replace key swing vote
Update:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire - letting Trump pick ANOTHER conservative justice to replace key swing vote
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The Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s travel ban Tuesday, siding with the president in Trump v. Hawaii. The 5-4 decision legally allows vast immigration restriction from several majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
While the court’s opinion stated the president had “sufficient national security justification” to order the travel ban, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a scorching dissent calling attention to Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign road.
“The United States of America is a Nation built upon the promise of religious liberty,” they wrote.”Our Founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment. The Court’s decision today fails to safeguard that fundamental principle. It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.”
Their quotation refers to a statement Trump made in December 2015. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said then, at a South Carolina rally.
“The full record paints a far more harrowing picture from which a reasonable observer would readily conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by hostility and animus toward the Muslim faith,” they wrote.
The dissent continued to give Trump’s full statement on banning Muslims, which remained on his website until May 2017, several months into his presidency. From there, Sotomayor and Ginsburg account every moment during Trump’s campaign, month by month, where he defended his position on banning Muslims. After some time, Trump’s language surrounding a ban took a turn, focusing instead on “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“Asked in July 2016 whether he was ‘pull[ing] back from’ his pledged Muslim ban, Trump responded, ‘I actually don’t think it’s a rollback. In fact, you could say it’s an expansion,'” Sotomayor and Ginsburg account in their dissent. “He then explained that he used different terminology because ‘[p]eople were so upset when [he] used the word Muslim.'”
Continuing their account to when Trump signed the travel ban and thereafter, Sotomayor and Ginsburg provide detailed evidence of Trump’s personal view on Muslim immigrants and how he incorporated this rhetoric into his political policies, determining that with all the evidence, the travel ban is clearly motivated by anti-Muslim fervor.
“Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments,” Sotomayor concludes. “Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.”
