“[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.
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