A federal judge has accused President Trump of acting like a lawyer for the Klu Klux Klan and segregationist senators from the Jim Crow era.
“When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political,’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South,” said Carlton Wayne Reeves, 55, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, as he quoted Trump.
“When leaders chastise people for merely ‘us[ing] the courts,’ you can hear the Citizens Council, hammering up the names of black petitioners in Yazoo City, [Mississippi].”
Reeves was speaking at the University of Virginia School of Law as he received the law school’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal.
“When the powerful accuse courts of opening ‘up our country to potential terrorists,’ you can hear the Southern Manifesto’s authors, smearing the judiciary for simply upholding the rights of black folk. When lawmakers say, ‘We should get rid of judges,’ you can hear segregationist senators writing bills to strip courts of their power.”
Reeves praised President Barack Obama, saying he had done more than Trump ever will to advance the interests of minorities in the judiciary. “For a brief moment, there were so many ‘firsts, — each one making our judiciary better reflect the best of America,” he said in a version of the speech obtain by BuzzFeed, highlighting that he became the second black federal judge in Mississippi after Obama appointed him in 2010.
He took aim at Trump judges, saying they were disconnected from the real life because they were white and male.
“Think of the pattern of judicial nominees refusing to admit, like generations of nominees before them have, that Brown v. Board was correctly decided. That same Brown, which led to Alexander v. Holmes County [Board of Education], which breathed justice into the segregated streets of my Yazoo City,” he said. “As if equality was a mere political position.”
Ethics rules limit what judges can say in public about politics. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court faced widespread criticism when she blasted Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Reeves’s criticism appeared carefully planned. The written version of his speech was 16 pages long and contained 130 footnotes citing Trump’s tweets, news reports and law review articles.
