Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge?
Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is of Mexican descent.
Can there be any defense of a statement so horrific?
Just this. First, Trump has a perfect right to be angry about the judge’s rulings and to question his motives. Second, there are grounds for believing Trump is right.
On May 27, Curiel, at the request of The Washington Post, made public plaintiff accusations against Trump University — that the whole thing was a scam. The Post, which Bob Woodward tells us has 20 reporters digging for dirt in Trump’s past, had a field day.
And who is Curiel?
An appointee of President Obama, he has for years been associated with the La Raza Lawyers Association of San Diego, which supports pro-illegal immigrant organizations.
Set aside the folly of letting Clinton surrogates like the Post distract him from the message he should be delivering, what did Trump do to be smeared by a bipartisan media mob as a “racist”?
He attacked the independence of the judiciary, we are told.
But Presidents Jefferson and Jackson attacked the Supreme Court, and FDR, fed up with New Deal programs being struck down, tried to “pack the court” by raising the number of justices to 15 if necessary.
Abraham Lincoln leveled “that eminent tribunal” in his first inaugural, and once considered arresting Chief Justice Roger Taney.
The conservative movement was propelled by attacks on the Warren Court. In the ’50s and ’60s, “Impeach Earl Warren!” was plastered on billboards and bumper stickers all across God’s country.
The judiciary is independent, but that does not mean that federal judges are exempt from the same robust criticism as presidents or members of Congress.
Obama himself attacked the Citizens United decision in a State of the Union address, with the justices sitting right in front of him.
But Trump’s real hanging offense was that he brought up the judge’s ancestry, as the son of Mexican immigrants, implying that he was something of a judicial version of Univision’s Jorge Ramos.
Apparently, it is now not only politically incorrect, but, in Newt Gingrich’s term, “inexcusable,” to bring up the religious, racial or ethnic background of a judge, or suggest this might influence his actions on the bench.
But these things matter.
Does Newt think that when LBJ appointed Thurgood Marshall, ex-head of the NAACP, to the Supreme Court, he did not think Marshall would bring his unique experience as a black man and civil rights leader to the bench?
Surely, that was among the reasons Marshall was appointed.
When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a woman of Puerto Rican descent who went through college on affirmative action scholarships, did Obama think this would not influence her decision when it came to whether or not to abolish affirmative action?
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in a speech at Berkeley law school and in other forums.
Translation: Ethnicity matters, and my Latina background helps guide my decisions.
All of us are products of our family, faith, race and ethnic group. And the suggestion in these attacks on Trump that judges and justices always rise about such irrelevant considerations, and decide solely on the merits, is naive nonsense.
There are reasons why defense lawyers seek “changes of venue” and avoid the courtrooms of “hanging judges.”
When Obama reflexively called Sgt. Crowley “stupid” after Crowley’s 2009 encounter with that black professor at Harvard, and said of Trayvon Martin, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” was he not speaking as an African-American, as well as a president?
Pressed by John Dickerson on CBS, Trump said it’s “possible” a Muslim judge might be biased against him as well.
Another “inexcusable” outrage.
But does anyone think that if Obama appointed a Muslim to the Supreme Court, the LGBT community would not be demanding of all Democratic Senators that they receive assurances that the Muslim judge’s religious views on homosexuality would never affect his court decisions, before they voted to put him on the bench?
When Richard Nixon appointed Judge Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court, it was partly because he was a distinguished jurist of South Carolina ancestry. And the Democrats who tore Haynsworth to pieces did so because they feared he would not repudiate his Southern heritage and any and all ideas and beliefs associated with it.
To many liberals, all white Southern males are citizens under eternal suspicion of being racists. The most depressing thing about this episode is to see Republicans rushing to stomp on Trump, to show the left how well they have mastered their liberal catechism.
Judge Curiel openly belongs to a racially biased organization La Raza (The Race) that states its purpose is to promote the interests of the Latino Community, it is hard to believe he would not be biased in this case.
As such, he should recuse himself if for no other reason than to avoid the appearance of impropriety since many “Latino” organizations are actively, even violently, opposing Trump.
But anything and everything about Trump will be magnified beyond reason by the Democrats and MSM to turn the voters against him and show him in a negative light, remember what they did to Dan Quayle back in ’92 over a common spelling mistake of a single word?
Hillary’s obvious criminality will be fully excused and ignored by them as this is being done to Trump.
A related article: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/06/seven-times-democrats-were-overtly-racist-on-judges-before-trump/
The Democrats always push race in legal issues whenever it can be, especially with Judges.
“Can there be any defense of a statement so horrific?”
Oh please, using ‘horrific’ is just sensationalism and is not appropriate or even reasonable. Is this simply pandering.
This race/LGBT/muslim horrific shit is peaking, boom!
This is the best, most honest evaluation of this situation I have read yet. But, unfortunately it probably won’t spread very far. Its also infuriating that hispanics and blacks can belong to openly racist organizations like la raza/NAACP and its perfectly fine, they can still be judges, and we aren’t allowed to question their impartiality. This country deserves everything its going to get. I hope trump destroys these people.
Same sh!t, different day.
Wanting a wall with legal immigration = racist
Wanting to vet Muslim immigrants = islamaphobia
Calling a judge biased because he fronts for illegal immigration = more racism
Note to libs…it won’t work. We know the game by now. Donald is the future and Hillary is the past. Nationalism is our future, globalism is the past (globalism was just invented to drain the USA anyway).
Trump 2016
“Its also infuriating that hispanics and blacks can belong to openly racist organizations like la raza/NAACP and its perfectly fine, they can still be judges, and we aren’t allowed to question their impartiality.”
This, times 10,000,000,000.
I’m tired of this shit. I do not recognize its legitimacy in any way, shape or form.
Anonymous wrote: Judge Curiel openly belongs to a racially biased organization La Raza (The Race) that states its purpose is to promote the interests of the Latino Community, it is hard to believe he would not be biased in this case.
He should never have been appointed to anything, in that case, except perhaps dog catcher.
Good article and right on..
MA
Trump committed candor. We’re not used to that.
And add honesty to his list of crimes.
The Robot Judge
by Scott Adams
If you have been watching CNN, you know Anderson Cooper has been reporting about the discovery that a sitting judge is actually a robot. His name is Gonzalo Curiel and he is presiding over the Trump University case.
Curiel looks human on the outside, and he has passed as human for decades. But Cooper made it clear in his interviews yesterday that while science understands that 100% of humans are biased about just about everything, this robot judge is not susceptible to being influenced by his life experiences. It sounds deeply implausible, but no one on CNN challenged Cooper’s implication that Judge Curiel is the only bias-free entity in the universe. Ergo, he must be a robot.
Anyway, lots of folks on Twitter are asking me why Trump would accuse the robot judge of being “Mexican” when that is obviously a racist thing to say. Did Trump make a huge mistake, or is it some sort of clever persuasion thing?
Let’s dig into that.
For starters, it isn’t appropriate to label people – or robots – “Mexicans” if those people or robots are created in America. For example, I have an American friend with Italian heritage who often refers to herself as “Italian,” and obviously that is a case of self-racism. I find it offensive.
This problem isn’t limited to my one friend. I also know an American who calls herself Croatian and another American who calls himself Indian. I can barely stand to be in the same room with those racists. Worse yet, they seem unclear about the distinction between their ethnicity and the country where their parents grew up. It isn’t the same thing, people!
But right-and-wrong aside, is it a good legal strategy for Trump to sow doubts about the objectivity of the robot judge? It seems to me that the trial can go one of two ways.
1. Trump wins in court, in which case, Trump wins.
2. Trump loses in court, in which case, Trump says Democrats rigged the system to give him an unfair trial. We’re already primed to believe it.
From a legal perspective, race is not a reason to remove a judge. I haven’t heard anyone argue otherwise. But from a persuasion perspective, Trump is setting the stage for whatever is to come. So yes, it is smart, albeit offensive.
Some have asked why Trump’s legal team hasn’t asked for the judge to be replaced. My guess is that they want to keep him because they expect to lose the case and they plan to pin it on the judge. That’s how I would play it.
The one small problem with Trump’s strategy of questioning the robot’s objectivity is that it creates one more point of confirmation bias that Trump is a racist. Here’s what we have so far:
1. Trump wants to protect the melting pot that is America from the non-Americans who want to get into the country illegally. That’s the job of the President, and yet…it sounds a bit racist. That’s point-one of confirmation bias.
2. Trump said immigrants from Mexico are rapists. Under normal circumstances, a listener would understand him to mean that the socioeconomic circumstances of being an immigrant are correlated with higher-than-average crime rates of all types. But because you think Trump is a racist, your cognitive dissonance turned it into an accusation that all Mexican men, women, children, and unborn babies are rapists.
To make things worse, Trump is pro-life. The implication is that Trump believes one-month-old fetuses from Mexico somehow escape the womb at night to do their raping. It sounds implausible, but once you know Trump is a racist who thinks every single Mexican is a rapist, you have to assume he was talking about the fetuses too. That’s a tell for confirmation bias.
3. During one CNN interview Trump did not disavow the KKK in a clear and quick fashion that viewers expected. He did disavow the KKK and David Duke before the interview, and plenty of times afterwards. But that one time on live television he didn’t hear the question (he says) and he responded inadequately. It seems implausible that a candidate for president would intentionally avoid disavowing the KKK on live TV, but once you assume Trump is a racist, confirmation bias kicks in, and you assume he did just that.
4. Trump suggested a temporary ban on Muslim immigration until we can figure out what’s going on. That sounds totally racist…unless you know that Islam is open to all ethnicities…and as practiced in many places is incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. And ISIS is trying to get terrorists into the country by posing as immigrants. Viewed in isolation, the ban on Muslim immigration is offensive and problematic. But viewed in context with all of the other confirmation bias about Trump, it turns into evidence of racism.
5. And now Trump believes a judge might be biased because his parents grew up in Mexico. On one hand, every person in the world thinks that is a legitimate risk. On the other hand, when viewed in context of all of Trump’s other confirmation bias, it looks racist as hell.
I’m probably leaving out a few points of confirmation bias. But you get the point. Once you see Trump as a probable racist, you see “evidence” everywhere, even if there is none. That’s confirmation bias.
Judges have bias too. Except for the robot kind like Curiel.
For new readers, I endorse Hillary Clinton, but only for my my personal safety. I don’t agree with any of the candidates on policies.
That’s the trouble with Donald Trump; he goes around telling the truth. And that’s just not nice.
“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor