"I can hear the Klan's lawyers": Fed judge likens Trump's attacks on judiciary to KKK

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/2019/04/13/you-can-hear-klans-lawyers-federal-judge-likens-trumps-attacks-judiciary-kkk/
"President Trump has attacked the judiciary like few U.S. leaders before him, disparaging judges and their rulings as “dangerous,” “horrible” and “a complete and total disgrace.” Some of his supporters and fellow Republicans applaud and parrot him, but U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves said he hears something sinister: echoes of a time when the Ku Klux Klan and the architects of the Jim Crow South attacked the courts for chipping away at segregation and racism.

In a speech to the University of Virginia School of Law on Thursday, Reeves publicly criticized Trump’s aggressive responses to his administration’s losses in court and the lack of diversity in his judicial appointments — an extremely rare rebuke from a sitting federal judge. Though Reeves, whose court is in Jackson, Miss., never mentioned Trump by name, he quoted the president more than a dozen times and compared him to a stridently racist Alabama governor.
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"I know what I heard when a federal judge was called ‘very biased and unfair’ because he is ‘of Mexican heritage.’ When that judge’s ethnicity was said to prevent his issuing ‘fair rulings.’ When that judge was called a 'hater’ simply because he is Latino,” Reeves said. “I heard those words and I did not know if it was 1967 or 2017.”
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The second offensive came midway through the 20th century, Reeves said, and included the Southern Manifesto, a screed opposing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling against racial segregation in schools. More than 100 congressmen signed the document. “Its signatories pushed to strip federal courts of jurisdiction over civil rights claims and impeach judges receptive to those claims,” Reeves said.

It was during this period, he said, that “White power returned to the playbook of the past: smearing judges, shrinking judicial power, and scrubbing diversity from courtrooms.”

Now, half a century later, Reeves said Americans are “eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary.” "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,” he said..".....(more)

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