Trump Supporters Want John Roberts to Recuse Himself From Impeachment Trial

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Follow me, if you will, on a brief hypothetical journey. Let’s say the House of Representatives draws up and passes articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Per the Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts would preside over Trump’s trial in the Senate. Now, imagine Roberts—a George W. Bush appointee—recusing himself from the trial because he once publicly emphasized judges’ responsibility to act in a non-partisan manner.

That’s how influential Trump supporter and radio host John Cardillo would have it, the conservative Washington Times reported Sunday. Cardillo claims that a statement made by Roberts in November 2018—in response to Trump’s criticism of a federal judge—means that he is biased against the president.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts wrote last year in a statement released by the court’s public information office. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

For Cardillo, these comments are apparently disqualifying. “There is already a crisis of confidence among the American people that we have a fair system of justice,” he said, according to the Times. “When you have a chief justice of the Supreme Court overtly making comments that are derogatory to the president of the United States, take all speculation out of the process.”

The framing of the article suggests the Times is taking Cardillo’s argument seriously, though the story does make clear that constitutional law experts roundly reject Cardillo’s reasoning. Orin Kerr, a scholar at UC Berkeley, called the argument for recusal “weak” and “hard to square” with the Constitution.

In the unlikely event that Roberts did decide to recuse himself, the most senior justice would step in, according to one expert cited by the Times. That’s Clarence Thomas, the most conservative member of the court.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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