President Donald Trump keeps attacking the conservative Supreme Court justices, including those he appointed, for ruling against him. CNN’s chief Supreme Court analyst says that may be helping them.
Trump recently told Time magazine he regrets some of his picks for the court.
“Yeah, yeah, what can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often,” Trump said. “I gave them the position of a lifetime. They vote against me often.”
On CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Sunday, Joan Biskupic told host Manu Raju that the justices don’t like the criticism, partly because of security worries. But she said it also gives some of them cover.
“What it does for some of them, including, I think, the chief justice, is it’s a little bit of a badge of honor,” Biskupic said.
She said Chief Justice John Roberts and several of his conservative colleagues are often seen as “in the bag for Donald Trump,” even though they’ve ruled against him plenty of times.
“When the president criticizes them, they can say, see, he doesn’t like us either,” she said.
“It kind of helps them in some ways,” Raju said.
“Seriously. It does,” Biskupic replied.
She said Roberts, whom she has written a biography of, is trying to steer a course where “he is very conservative, and he is ruling for a lot of the president’s initiatives, but he doesn’t want the court to be seen as linking arms with Donald Trump.”
That gets harder as public trust in the court falls. Raju cited a new Gallup poll that found only 12% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust in the judicial branch.
Biskupic said the chief justice is “very aware of the court’s reputation and his own legacy,” but she isn’t sure “he has figured out a way to do much about it.”
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