President Donald Trump demanded that liberal Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse themselves from all cases related to his administration.
"This is a terrible thing to say. Trying to 'shame' some into voting her way?" Trump tweeted. "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', I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States Supreme Court!" he wrote.
Trump doubles down:
Trump repeated his demand during a news conference on his trip to India.
"I just don't know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump-related," he said.
"Her statement was so inappropriate," he said. "When you're a justice of the Supreme Court — it's almost what she's trying is take the people who do feel a different way and get them to vote the way that she would like them to vote. I just thought it was so inappropriate, such a terrible statement for a Supreme Court statement."
Asked if there was a specific part of Sotomayor’s comments he found inappropriate, Trump relied, "you know what the statement was."
When a reporter accurately summarized her statement, Trump replied, "No, I don't think that was it."
Sotomayor accused conservatives of placating Trump:
Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion last week that Trump is too quick to appeal lower court losses to the Supreme Court and justices are too eager to let him.
"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," she wrote. "And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow."
Sotomayor said the court has been “all too quick to grant the government’s” requests.
"Perhaps most troublingly, the court's recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others," she said, referring to the Trump administration.
