Miguel Estrada, the conservative judge who immigrated from Honduras as a teenager, was “especially dangerous, because,” Democratic Judiciary Committee aides wrote, “he is Latino.”
So Donald Trump, the liberal Hillary Clinton donor who has conned Republicans into nominating him for president, has shown this week that he thinks like a (slightly addled) liberal on judges. In this way, Trump demolishes the sole reason many conservatives ever had to vote for him in November.
Some background:
Last decade, Donald Trump ran a scam called “Trump University,” wherein he pretended to be selling real estate secrets that would make people rich. Instead he was just taking money from desperate people. Some of those people are now suing Trump for fraud.
The federal judge in the case is Indiana-born Gonzalo Curiel, the son of Mexican immigrants, a former prosecutor, and a former appointee of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Trump has argued that Curiel has “an inherent conflict of interest” because of his “Mexican heritage.”
Conservative critics have pointed out a few things: First, this shows Trump doesn’t really believe that Hispanics will vote for him, as Trump claims. Also, this is “the literal definition of racism,” in the words of conservative Senator Ben Sasse.
Trump’s argument is that a judge, with a decade on the bench following 27 years as a practicing attorney and prosecutor, cannot overcome his ethnicity (or perhaps his parents’ nationality) to rule impartially. It’s a ridiculous argument. And it’s a dumber version of arguments put forward on the Left for years.
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor once said in a speech, “with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than the white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The premise here: Race and ethnicity affect a judge’s ability to reach the right conclusion. This is Donald Trump’s premise, too.
“[J]udges’ race significantly affects outcomes,” at least in workplace racial harassment cases, wrote liberal law professor Pat Chew from the University of Pittsburgh in her 2008 law review article “Myth of the Color-Blind Judge.”
A constant refrain in the more radical corners of the Left today is that white people, because they are white people, don’t have the right or the ability to express valid opinions on certain questions. Trump, the candidate of white racial grievance, has adopted that logic and turned it around.
Democrats’ 2001 discrimination against Estrada was a different sort of judicial racialism. Democrats had to filibuster a Hispanic’s elevation to the D.C. Circuit Court, presumably, because it would be bad PR to filibuster a Hispanic’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. But still, it was a racial litmus test for judges’ qualifications. Trump may have been taking notes.
Trump’s liberal views on judges don’t end with his embrace of racial determinism. He also engages in the liberal practice of scolding judges and trying to disqualify them on flimsy grounds.
Democrats like Nancy Pelosi regularly called for conservative judges like Antonin Scalia to recuse themselves from cases, because they had gone hunting with the vice president, or had cited an academic paper some on the left found offensive. Liberal writers in 2012 threatened to declare the Supreme Court illegitimate if it ruled against the administration’s Obamacare argument that intra-state non-commerce counts as interstate commerce.
An independent judiciary doesn’t fit will into certain left-wing strains of thought. Donald Trump, who scoffs at any constraints on executive power, feels the same way.
Trump’s other expressed views of the judiciary are equally dumb. He speaks about judges “signing bills.” He says he’ll pick judges who will investigate Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Combine these clueless arguments with his liberal view of the judiciary, and it’s impossible to trust his pledge to nominate conservative judges.
And if you don’t trust Trump to nominate conservative judges, you’re getting pretty close to zero reasons a conservative should support him. For many conservatives, “judges” is the only argument.
The racial determinism of the Left is destructive and wrong. The view is even more destructive and more wrong when it is applied to the in-power racial majority. Trump’s views have horrified Republicans who worry he could devastate the GOP among Hispanic voters. His comments on Judge Curiel have this virtue, though: They reveal Trump for what he truly is.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
