(AFP) – US President Donald Trump launched an extraordinary personal attack Friday on the Supreme Court justices who struck down his global tariffs, including two of his own appointees, and claimed they were being “swayed by foreign interests.”
“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” Trump told reporters at a White House press conference. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” he said, deriding them at one point as “fools and lap dogs.”
The Supreme Court has overwhelmingly sided with Trump since he took office in January of last year, and the tariffs ruling was the first major setback for the Republican president before the conservative-dominated court. Asked if he regretted nominating justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — who both voted against him — to the top court, Trump said he did not “want to say whether or not I regret.”
“I think their decision was terrible,” he said. “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families if you want to know the truth, the two of them.” Chief Justice John Roberts, Coney Barrett, and Gorsuch, all conservatives, joined with the court’s three liberals in the 6-3 ruling that Trump’s sweeping global tariffs were illegal.
Trump heaped praise on the conservative justices who voted to uphold his authority to levy tariffs — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee. He thanked the three for their “strength and wisdom, and love of our country.” Trump in particular singled out Kavanaugh, who wrote a 63-page dissent to the tariffs ruling, calling him a “genius” and saying he was “so proud of him.”
The president also alleged there was foreign influence behind the ruling. “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests,” he said. “I think that foreign interests are represented by people that I believe have undue influence.”
“They have a lot of influence over the Supreme Court, whether it’s through fear or respect or friendships, I don’t know,” he said. Asked by a reporter if he had evidence of foreign influence on the court, Trump replied: “You’re going to find out.”
Vice President JD Vance added his voice to the condemnation of the tariffs ruling, calling it “lawlessness from the court, plain and simple.” Tensions between the White House and the Supreme Court are not new — a frustrated president Franklin D Roosevelt once proposed expanding the court to pack it with Democratic loyalists.
But Steven Schwinn, a constitutional law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said Trump’s “gratuitous and ad hominem attacks” on individual justices reveal “his fundamental misunderstanding of the separation of powers.” “He seems to believe that any good-faith disagreement with his own interpretation of the law is, by definition, illegitimate,” Schwinn told AFP. “At the same time, he lacks any serious interpretation of the law of his own, except to say that the law is what he wants it to be. This is not how a democracy works.”
Trump was also asked whether the six justices who voted against him would be welcome at next week’s State of the Union speech before Congress. “Three are happily invited,” the president said. The others are “invited, barely,” he said, before adding, “I couldn’t care less if they come.”
– Chris Lefkow
© 2024 AFP
