RUTHFULLY YOURS

Annoyed at federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel’s persistent rulings against him in the Trump University case (brought by a law firm that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by Bill and Hillary), Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that maybe it’s because the judge is a second-generation Mexican immigrant.

The entire media — and most of the GOP — have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he’ll build a wall. Now they’re outraged that Trump thinks one Mexican hates him for saying he’ll build a wall.

Curiel has distributed scholarships to illegal aliens. He belongs to an organization that sends lawyers to the border to ensure that no illegal aliens’ “human rights” are violated. The name of the organization? The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association — “La Raza” meaning THE RACE.

Let’s pause to imagine the nomination hearings for a white male who belonged to any organization for white people — much less one with the words “THE RACE” in its title.

The media were going to call Trump a racist whatever he did, and his attack on a Hispanic judge is way better than when they said it was racist for Republicans to talk about Obama’s golfing.

Has anyone ever complained about the ethnicity of white judges or white juries? I’ve done some research and it turns out … THAT’S ALL WE’VE HEARD FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS.

The New York Times alone has published hundreds of articles, editorials, op-eds, movie reviews, sports articles and crossword puzzles darkly invoking “white judges” and “all-white” juries, as if that is ipso facto proof of racist justice.

Two weeks ago — that’s not an error; I didn’t mean to type “decades” and it came out “weeks” — the Times published an op-ed by a federal appeals judge stating: “All-white juries risk undermining the perception of justice in minority communities, even if a mixed-race jury would have reached the same verdict or imposed the same sentence.”

Donald Trump has every right to question the impartiality of a “pro-Mexican” judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit and doing so does not make him a racist or a bigot of any kind.

The stampede of weak-kneed Republican office-holders tripping over each other in a frenzied rush to denounce the presumptive GOP nominee for president shows how the Left’s pathological ideas about race continue to dominate the thinking even of so-called conservatives who ought to know better. Yell “racist!” and Republicans run for the hills.

As Pat Buchanan opines, “[t]o 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.”

To recap, the real estate magnate has said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an Indiana-born U.S. citizen whose parents emigrated from Mexico, is issuing unfair rulings against him in a high-profile class-action lawsuit. Trump claims the trial judge’s prejudice relates to his promise to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep illegal aliens out.

Curiel ordered that internal documents from Trump University be made public. The ruling caused elation among reporters, including 20 from the Washington Post who are digging for dirt about the candidate, as they began fantasizing about winning the Pulitzer Prize for taking down a Republican presidential candidate.

Trump said it is “just common sense” that Curiel’s connections to Mexico explain his anti-Trump rulings.

“He’s a member of a club or society very strongly pro-Mexican, which is all fine. But I say he’s got bias,” Trump said Sunday. “This judge has treated me very unfairly. He’s treated me in a hostile manner, and there’s something going on.” Trump also said it is “possible” a Muslim judge might also be biased against him because he advocates a temporary ban on the entry of Muslims into the U.S.

Trump is right. Judges can be influenced, sometimes inappropriately, by their life experiences.

Besides, Trump was merely echoing remarks by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a person of Puerto Rican ancestry, who said her ethnicity and upbringing affect her rulings. “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.”

So if Trump’s comments were racist – and in this writer’s opinion they were not – then so were Sotomayor’s. Sotomayor is met with applause; Trump is met with sputtering vituperation.

Would a mainstream politician have dared raise the affiliations, sympathies, ethnic heritage and political patrons of the judge hearing his case? Never, not in a million years. But the outsider candidate detested by his own party’s establishment is no normal politician. Nor is he a racist

Donald Trump gets into trouble to often for his own good and America’s. He has to get with the PC program, give away his throwaways and stick to major national issues and policies. His policy objectives are all vote winners. Look at this partial list and find fault if you can. Putting myself in patriotic American shoes, I can’t.

Securing the border, building the military, taking better care of vets, destroying ISIS, putting America first by insisting that allies pull their military weight
Controlling immigration, particularly Muslim immigration
Replacing Obamacare
Creating jobs by lowering taxes and regulations, liberating the exploitation of fossil fuel energy and negotiating better trade deals.

If he concentrates on his policies and reserves his criticisms for Clinton he will likely win. It’s the diversions that get him into trouble. This time Trump criticised the judge hearing the class-action civil suit against Trump University, which, as I understand it, purported to teach people how to profit from real estate. That would have been OK. His mistake was in suggesting that the judge’s Mexican heritage (his parents were Mexican migrants) may have played a part in swaying his conduct of the proceedings.

He said this because the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, appointed by President Obama, is a member of a Latino lawyers association (La Raza Lawyers Association) whose members have a record of acting for illegal migrants. Moreover, the class action was brought by a legal firm which has given large sums of money to the Clintons. Trump’s thinking is that the case has taken on a political dimension and that his own strong stand on illegal Mexican immigration may have affected the judge’s ability to act objectively.

Trump argues that his side is being treated unfairly. As an example he notes that a leading plaintiff was found to be on record praising the University. As a result, the legal firm representing her asked that she be removed from the case; as you would. At question, in Trump’s view, is why the judge allowed this without summarily dismissing the case.

I have no idea of the precise accuracy of this account or of the legal rights and wrongs of what occurred. But that doesn’t matter. The question I would like to pose is this: was Trump’s statement racist, as Paul Ryan and other Republicans have said; and as numbers of conservative commentators like, for example, Charles Krauthammer, have said?

I will cut to the chase. It isn’t racist. Asserting that some white jurymen and white judges in the Deep South in, say, the 1960s were influenced by their ethnicity in evaluating the testimony of black witnesses is not racist. As we know, in those cases, the racists were on the bench and on the juries.

Of course, if Trump had said what his critics claim it would be racist. Time and time again, I heard them say that Trump had said that Curiel’s Mexican heritage disqualified him from hearing the case. The problem is that he didn’t say that. The segment of the stump address that sparked the escalating brouhaha can be viewed below. Watch it if you have 11 minutes to spare and see if the press is reporting an actual comment or an imaginary one.

To hear many commentators tell it, Donald Trump claims that an American-born judge, by dint of nothing other than his Mexican ancestry, should be deemed so biased against him that the judge should be recused from a civil fraud case in which Trump is a defendant. Indeed, Trump is said to have dug himself an even deeper hole last weekend, adding Muslim-American judges to the class of jurists before whom we are to believe he cannot get a fair trial.

For present purposes, I am putting the Muslim judge issue aside because it is hypothetical – i.e., while Trump’s meanderings about the judge of Mexican descent involve a concrete case, I know of no actual case involving the litigious Trump and a judge who happens to be Muslim.

Moreover, to avoid further elongating this column, I will not address whether, in analyzing an actual legal claim of judicial bias, a judge’s race, ethnic ancestry or religious affiliation might become relevant due to that judge’s political activism. Trump surrogates insist that, to the extent the candidate has invoked a judge’s Mexican descent or (hypothetically) Islam, he was not relying solely on ethnic or religious status, but on such status in conjunction with political activism on behalf of Mexican illegal aliens or political Islam’s sharia law agenda. There is a lot to be said for this argument, which reminds us why judges – who are obliged to maintain the objectivity and public integrity of judicial proceedings – should resist political activism. In any event, this is a complex legal issue and it deserves separate consideration.

Instead, the purpose of this column is to focus on two rudimentary questions that I do not believe have been adequately addressed:

First, did Trump do it? That is, has he posited an actual legal claim – a noxious and dangerous one – that mere ethnic heritage can disqualify a judge from presiding over a legal controversy? Or is Trump, as I conclude, making an unsavory political argument?

Second, is Trump’s argument really about the purported bias of the judge in question, Gonzalo P. Curiel of the federal district court in Southern California? Or is Trump, as I conclude, attempting – however cynically – to draw the sting of disclosures regarding the civil fraud case involving “Trump University”?

To cut to the chase: Is Trump trying to discredit the judge, not out of racism or an honest belief that Judge Curiel is violating his due process rights, but in hopes of discrediting the underlying Trump U shenanigans by persuading people that it is a biased judge, rather than damaging evidence, that is making him look bad? Does Trump fear that his critics will otherwise use the Trump U disclosures against him the same way Hillary Clinton’s detractors have exploited disclosures about her email improprieties to damage her presidential bid?

“A lifetime member of an organization that very recently made public calls for a general boycott of the defendant’s businesses.”

The most important argument in favor of forcing U.S. district judge Gonzalo Curiel to recuse himself from the Trump University lawsuits was published today by the Conservative Treehouse.

The Treehouse linked to a copy of Judge Curiel’s “United States Senate: Committee on the Judiciary – Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees” in which, on page four of his response, Judge Curiel states that he is a “Life-time Member” of the “Hispanic National Bar Association [HNBA].”

The HNBA made public a press release in July 2015 that called for the following actions against Donald Trump and his enterprises:

The HNBA calls for a boycott of all of Trump business ventures, including golf courses, hotels, and restaurants. We salute NBC/Universal, Univision and Macy’s for ending their association with Trump, and we join them in standing up against bigotry and racist rhetoric. Other businesses and corporations should follow the lead of NBC/Universal, Univision and Macy’s and take similar actions against Donald Trump’s business interests.

A case can be made that no sitting judge should be aligned with any such activist organization in general, but for a judge to preside over a case involving a defendant’s business whereby said judge is also a lifetime member of an organization that very recently made public calls for a general boycott of the defendant’s businesses is an undeniable stain on the purported impartiality of the judiciary.