Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is downplaying Donald Trump’s criticism of a Hispanic federal judge by saying the allusions Trump made to the judge’s ethnicity are no worse than comments made by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Trump attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel after the unsealing of documents pertaining to an ongoing fraud case, and claimed the Indiana-born jurist is “a Mexican” and therefore biased against Trump’s political campaign. Senate Democrats argue that the remark proves he’s unfit to pick the next Supreme Court justice.
Grassley this week criticized the presumptive GOP nominee’s comments, but suggested that some of the blowback is overwrought.
“I think that you don’t have any more trouble with what Trump said than when Sotomayor said that — when she was found saying in speeches that, quote, ‘A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male,'” the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said on a conference call with Iowa reporters, according to the Des Moines Register.
“I don’t hear any criticism of that sort of comment by a justice of the Supreme Court.”
That echoes the defense offered by Trump’s chief proponents. The Drudge Report linked to New York Times story from May of 2009 that quoted Sotomayor, who was not at the time a Supreme Court nominee, as saying ethnicity “will make a difference in our judging.”
Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan administration official who is now surrogate for real estate mogul, referenced the Sotomayor speech in an op-ed denouncing Republicans who described the comment as racist.
“Donald Trump is calling out this flat-out racism by targeting a judge for what might be called the judge’s ‘wise Latino’ ways?” Lord wrote Tuesday. “Suddenly the GOP Establishment is attacking Trump?”
Curiel won the praise of Trump’s lawyer last month, when he agreed to delay the fraud trial until after the election. “We’re not seeking to recuse the judge … I think the court today did a good job ,” attorney Daniel Petrocelli told reporters, as first noted by Yahoo News. “He made the decision. We would prefer to trial at a later time and he set it to Nov. 28. But it was preferable to before the election.”
But Trump attacked Curiel in San Diego last week and defended the charges in follow-up interviews. “We’re building a wall,” he said Thursday. “He’s a Mexican. The answer is he’s giving us unfair rulings.”
