WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on the judiciary on Thursday, accusing judges of making the country unsafe as he fanned a bitter row over asylum seekers.
Trump launched the latest salvo of tweets on the issue a day after clashing publicly with the chief justice of the Supreme Court over the independence of the courts.
“Judges must not Legislate Security... and Safety at the Border, or anywhere else,” Trump tweeted.
“They know nothing about it and are making our Country unsafe. Our great Law Enforcement professionals MUST BE ALLOWED TO DO THEIR JOB! If not there will be only bedlam, chaos, injury and death,” he added. Trump, who has attacked judges before after unfavourable court rulings, gave vent to his anger earlier this week after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a presidential proclamation on asylum.
The proclamation said only people entering the United States at official checkpoints can apply for asylum, automatically rejecting those caught sneaking across the border.
In an extraordinary step, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts reacted to Trump’s calling the federal judge who issued the ruling an “Obama judge.”
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement to the Associated Press.
“What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them,” Roberts said.
Trump responded on Thursday.
“Justice Roberts can say what he wants, but the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster,” Trump tweeted on Thursday.
“It is out of control, has a horrible reputation, is overturned more than any Circuit in the Country, 79 per cent, & is used to get an almost guaranteed result.” According to US media reports, the Supreme Court did reverse around 79 per cent of 9th Circuit cases reviewed from 2010-2015 — but the 6th Circuit in fact had the highest reversal rate of 87 per cent.
Roberts, who administered the oath of office to Trump when he was sworn in as president last year, has himself been the target of Trump’s attacks, in particular because of a 2012 ruling that preserved Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, said Roberts “is sending up a signal that Trump has gone beyond the pale of responsible political discourse.”
“For a long time the chief justice didn’t respond to it. I suspect at some point Roberts decided enough was enough and he had to say something,” Somin added.
Trump last year referred to a jurist who ruled against him on his travel ban as a “so-called judge.”
Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 said a judge in a case involving Trump University was biased against him because of the jurist’s Mexican-American heritage.
With the help of a Senate controlled by his fellow Republicans, Trump has appointed a succession of conservative judges in a bid to move the federal judiciary to the right. His appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court have solidified its conservative majority for perhaps years to come.
Roberts issued his statement in response to a request for comment from the Associated Press about Trump’s Tuesday remarks. — AFP
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