Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is already hearing calls for her recusal in a case over North Carolina’s voter ID law, which was overturned Friday by a federal court.
“Given her comments attacking Donald Trump, there’s a real question about whether Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse herself from the North Carolina voter ID case,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said Friday afternoon.
Ginsburg attracted widespread criticism in early July for attacking the GOP nominee repeatedly, comments that she acknowledged were “ill-advised” given her obligation to be a nonpartisan jurist.
Judicial Watch wrote an amicus brief in support of the North Carolina voter ID laws, which passed with the support of Republican lawmakers in 2014. But a panel of Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges concluded that the law was passed with the intent of discriminating against black voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.
“Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” the panel’s majority opinion noted. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.”
It’s not clear whether the case will eventually come before the Supreme Court.
