Republican D.C. lawyer George Conway was one of the co-founders of the anti-Donald Trump group The Lincoln Project that is running ads against GOP enablers of the president's illegal behavior.
In an op-ed, he wrote for The Washington Post Sunday, Conway warned of the blowback the country will endure from Trump attacking the judiciary the way that he does the media.
"I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you," Trump admitted to Lesley Stahl in a 2016 "60 Minutes" interview.
"That's just what Trump did the other day, and what he has been doing for some time, with judges," wrote Conway. "We all remember Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, the federal district judge in San Diego who handled the case against the president's now-defunct Trump University. Trump derided the Indiana-born Curiel as having an 'absolute conflict' because he was "Mexican" (and thus 'a hater of Donald Trump'). More recently, Trump went after Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who presided over the trial of felonious presidential friend Roger Stone. Trump claimed she was biased because she supposedly put another of his criminal associates, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in solitary confinement. (She didn't.) "
Now Trump is attacking the U.S. Supreme Court because they don't agree with him. During what should have been a diplomatic international press conference in India, Trump attacked Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, saying that they have no business ruling on issues related to him."
"Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!" he tweeted.
By that same logic, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch have no business ruling on Trump issues because they were appointed by Trump.
Conway called the demand "a sham," saying that if Trump wants the judges to recuse themselves, there's a process for it.
"But Trump won't do that with the justices, just as he didn't do it with Curiel," he wrote. "No competent Supreme Court practitioner — be they Trump's private counsel, or the solicitor general representing him in his official capacity — would ever file it."
He explained that a motion like that would be "meritless," and Trump's attacks on Sotomayor made it clear that he either hadn't read or didn't understand the opinion she wrote.
"The case didn't involve Trump personally but the administration's effort to tighten immigration rules," Conway explained. "The justices, lifting a stay imposed by a lower court, allowed the new 'public charge' rule to take effect; Sotomayor disagreed."
Her dissent didn't even mention Donald Trump, not that he cares.
"As for Ginsburg, Trump resurrected a years-old beef. In 2016, in an interview with the New York Times, Ginsburg expressed horror at the idea of a Trump presidency," Conway explained.
"I can't imagine what this place would be — I can't imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president," she said. She went on to call Trump a "faker" with "no consistency about him."
Conway said that she probably shouldn't have said it, and she agreed, later saying she regretted saying it. Still, if that determined recusal, many of the conservative justices on the court over the last two decades would have been forced to recuse themselves.
"In doing so, he attacks more than individual judges; he shows contempt for the rule of law," Conway closed. "It is a dangerous thing for country to have a man whose office charges him with faithfully executing the law instead so brazenly seek to undermine respect for it."
