President Donald Trump has won most of his big cases in front of the Supreme Court, but he occasionally loses too — and his rage against America’s highest bench for deciding against him just took a new low, according to one of that court’s jurists.
While appearing before the Senate with her colleague Justice Amy Coney Barrett to request more funding for security, Justice Elena Kagan singled out Trump’s rhetoric as a cause of putting the judges in danger.
“I just want to pick up a point that Sen. Collins made about outrageous statements that are being made by public figures, and I can’t think of a more prominent one than the president,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) said to the pair of judges, referring to comments by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) about Trump. “He said, ‘Disgrace to our nation. Fools. Lapdogs for the RINOs and radical left Democrats.’ He was describing the Supreme Court.”
Kagan denounced Trump’s language.
“Whatever political figure says them, whatever party that political figure is a member of, these statements are really unhelpful,” Kagan told Reed. “They’re dangerous in terms of individual justices’ security, and they’re not appropriate in the way to treat a coordinate branch of government.” She then referenced a report by Chief Justice John Roberts about the security needs of the judges.
“He talked about how criticism is fair game… but intimidation is a different thing entirely, and when political figures of any stripe are trying to intimidate judges and justices to do things that they like rather than the things that they don’t, that’s where we really have crossed the line,” Kagan told Reed.
The Supreme Court has broadly given Trump whatever he wants, from allowing him to fire ostensibly independent officials from federal agencies and rendering him immune from most forms of prosecution. At the same time, they have occasionally sided against him, from his attempts to hinder mail-in voting and his unilateral tariffs to his desire to avoid paying a settlement to the woman he was found liable for sexually abusing, E. Jean Carroll.