CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin condemned Sen. Chuck Schumer for issuing a “threat” to two Supreme Court justices.
Schumer, the Senate minority leader from New York, said on Wednesday that Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both Trump appointees, would “pay the price” if they choose to uphold a Louisiana law that mandates abortion doctors be preapproved to check their patients into a nearby hospital.
The comments, which were followed by rebukes from both President Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts, sparked admonishment from Toobin on Thursday morning.
“Well, if you parse what Chuck Schumer said, it was wrong, it was inappropriate. It was not the way you should talk about the Supreme Court,” he explained before adding that the Democrat’s comments were “political hyperbole of a sort that politicians shouldn’t engage in.”
CNN’s New Day co-host John Berman then noted that while Roberts has rebuked Trump once previously, he did not last month when the president demanded Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who lean to the Left, to recuse themselves from cases involving himself or his administration.
“If you want to start parsing what everyone said,” he explained. “The president did not say about Ginsburg and Sotomayor that they are gonna reap the whirlwind, that they’re, you know, in physical danger. He said they should recuse themselves. It was a ridiculous argument, but it was a political argument. It wasn’t a personal attack.”
“I’m certainly not going to defend what Chuck Schumer said,” Toobin responded, adding, “It did sound like a physical threat. I think if you look at Chuck Schumer’s entire record, if you look at how he behaves, he does not threaten people physically. It was a — certainly a bad choice of words.”
In defending himself, Schumer argued that his comments were taken out of context and that his perceived threat was a warning to Republican senators of the political price they “will pay for putting these justices on the court.” The Democratic lawmaker also accused the chief justice of acting out of partisanship in his criticism.
