Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed “regret” Thursday morning for commenting on the presidential election in multiple recent interviews.
“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them,” she said. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”
Ginsburg told the Associated Press last week she didn’t “want to think about that possibility” of a Donald Trump presidency. She then dusted off one of her late husband’s lines to describe her feelings about a Trump White House: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,” she joked to the New York Times. And she kept going, calling Trump “a faker” in a CNN article.
Republicans, including House speaker Paul Ryan, criticized Ginsburg for displaying such outward political bias despite her role as a judge. It was less about Trump, Ryan seemed to suggest, than it was the principle of the thing. “For someone on the Supreme Court who is going to be calling balls and strikes in the future based upon whatever the next president and Congress does, that strikes me as inherently biased and out of the realm,” he told CNN.
If Ginsburg wanted to step out of the Court’s realm fully for the sake of politics, it’s not like Charles Evans Hughes didn’t do the same thing—almost exactly 100 years ago.
