President Donald Trump has a fraught relationship with federal judges. During his presidential campaign, Trump lashed out at Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, claiming that Curiel would be unfair in his ruling because of his "Mexican heritage." Then this past weekend, Trump skewered a George W. Bush appointee, Judge James Robart, over a temporary freeze on Trump's travel ban. For standing in the way of Trump's order, Robart was a "so-called judge," Trump claimed in a series of furious tweets:
When a president tweets insults at a Hollywood star, the dignity of his office is tarnished. When a commander-in-chief uses Twitter to attack a loyal military ally, America's friends across the globe become unsettled. But when a president uses social media to question the legitimacy of a federal judge following an inconvenient (and temporary) outcome, that is simply unacceptable. From Marbury v. Madison to United States v. Nixon, our federal courts' power to interpret the Constitution has been sacrosanct. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in U.S. v. Nixon, the concept of checks and balances endures because it has remained (to quote Marbury) "the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." [The Washington Post]
Read Scarborough's full takedown in The Washington Post.
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