During Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, presidential candidate Donald Trump tried to defend previous comments about how he would potentially nominate his pro-abortion sister to the Supreme Court.
Trump has faced criticism in some quarters from pro-life voters who point to a past interview he gave about his sister, who is a pro-abortion attorney.
As National Review reported in 2015:
Donald Trump told Mark Halperin yesterday that his sister, a federal judge, would be a “phenomenal” Supreme Court justice. He also said that “we will have to rule that out now, at least.”
If he ever becomes president, let’s hope he rules it out permanently. Maryanne Trump Barry came up in my book The Party of Death for writing one of those heated judicial decisions in favor of giving constitutional protection to partial-birth abortion. She called a New Jersey law against it a “desperate attempt” to undermine Roe v. Wade.
It was, she wrote, “based on semantic machinations, irrational line-drawing, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion instead of logic or medical evidence.” It made no difference where the fetus was when it “expired.” So: The right of abortionists to make a child “expire” by partially extracting her from the womb, sticking scissors in the back of her head, vacuuming out her brain, and crushing her skull to complete her extraction, is right there in the Constitution. But let’s please not have any “semantic machinations.”
Trump eventually said he was joking about the comments.
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During the debate, Trump sought to respond to pro-life Senator Ted Cruz, who has brought up Trump’s comment as a criticism for the kind of judges he would appoint.
TRUMP: Now, Ted’s been very critical — I have a sister who’s a brilliant…
TRUMP: … excuse me. She’s a brilliant judge. He’s been criticizing — he’s been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill.
So I think that maybe we should get a little bit of an apology from Ted. What do you think?
Apart from the fact that judges do not sign bills into law, pro-life attorney Matt Bowman of Alliance Defending Freedom indicates Trump is wrong on the point and that Justice Alito, when he was a lower court justice, not only did not agree with Judge Maryanne Trump Barry on opposing a bill to ban partial-birth abortions he went out of his way to indicate how he disagreed with her.
Judge Alito did not agree with Trump’s sister on partial birth abortion case, he explicitly wrote “I do not join Judge Barry’s opinion.”
— Matt Bowman (@mattbowman2000) February 26, 2016
Then-Judge Alito: “I do not join Judge [Trump] Barry’s opinion, which was never necessary and is now obsolete.” https://t.co/HGz7GqbuB1 — Matt Bowman (@mattbowman2000) February 26, 2016
While some pro-life voters were shocked that Trump continued to defend Planned Parenthood others are shocked that Trump would defend his sister’s support for partial-birth abortions by falsely maligning a pro-life Supreme Court Justice who went to great lengths to be on record opposing abortion.
