"... this is the way critiques of judges should go. They should be based on rational legal arguments, not fits of passion." Got that, #TruthlessTrump?

...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENTS: 
*  No one could be a more complete liar than Trump. If he says anything true it's purely accidental. It is mostly driven by a profound ignorance.
*  The judiciary lost credibility when the corrupt Reagan- Bush supreme court passed citizens united making bribery legal.
*  Whether there is actually merit to Trump's claim or not is actually beside the point. The argument, such as it is, should be made in court by Trump's lawyers in a request for recusal, which, last time I checked, had not actually been made yet. Attacking the judge and the integrity of a case in which you are a party, publicly from the bully pulpit of a political race is definitely improper and unethical, and most Republican party leadership agrees. Trump's actions merit a contempt of court citation, though I doubt very much the judge will do so in this case. The most interesting part of this stunt is that there is absolutely nothing about it that could benefit Trump as a candidate. His rabid base doesn't need any further frothing, and the controversy just hurts him among voters whose heads are facing the right way. It's pure foot-shooting.  PS. In spite of the Spanish term la raza, Hispanics aren't really a race at all.
*  It's a lawyers' professional organization, not a racial supremacist group. Just repeating these brain-dead and unsupported claims over and over doesn't make them true. This is just the usual right-wing babble repeated in their echo chamber. Try reading this again:  "As Donald Trump's attacks on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel's Mexican heritage were being roundly condemned, he and his supporters turned their fire on an innocent bystander: The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, which counts Curiel among its members.  San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association is a pretty typical professional group that promotes diversity and Latino empowerment in the legal community. You can find similar organizations for African American lawyers, Asian lawyers, female lawyers and so forth, as well as parallel organizations in almost every other industry." http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/la-raza-san-diego-smear-campaign  Doesn't it strike you that almost everyone not a rabid Trump supporter has condemned Trump's stunt? Has the outside world ceased to matter to people on the Trump mothership? And once more: If there is an issue, it should have been raised in the legal proceedings, not at a Trump mass rally and the press. 
 ..........................................................................................................................................................................
Why today’s political climate scares judges
By John Ingold, June 12, 2016

Imagine, at this moment in American politics, that you are a judge.

Black robes. Gavel. All rise.

To your west, in California, you see presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arguing that a judge’s ethnic heritage alone should disqualify him from serving on a case. You see a heated petition campaign and angry state lawmakers calling for a different judge to resign based on a sentence he handed down to a former Stanford University swimmer convicted of sexual assault.

To your east, in Washington, you see a U.S. Supreme Court hobbling along with only eight justices because of a standoff over who should appoint the ninth. You see political gridlock that has left unfilled 80 other vacancies on the federal bench across the country, according to legal scholar Carl Tobias.

How would you feel about the state of America’s third branch of government?

Denver attorney Ben Aisenberg, who has been practicing law since the 1950s, knows his answer.

“In today’s atmosphere, it puts the judges, at least in the public’s mind, in a really bad light,” he said.

As political pugilists from increasingly distant corners pummel each other this election year, legal observers have begun to fear that the notion of an independent judiciary is also taking a beating.

Judges’ rulings have become the stuff of politicians’ stump speeches — and fund-raising campaigns. Social media can turn a local judge’s decision into a national argument.

The opening sentence of the code of conduct by which every judge in Colorado must abide states: “An independent, fair and impartial judiciary is indispensable to our system of justice.” But this is a political culture trending the other way: polarized, acrimonious and quick to rule.

“It hurts the judicial system, and I think it hurts the whole idea of courts that are generally fair and unbiased and the neutral role that judges are supposed to play,” said Jean Dubofsky, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice.

Judges are also easy targets. They can’t fight back.

Ethics rules and principles that require neutrality in public debates — even when the debate is about them — prohibit judges from discussing politics. There are 341 state-court judges sitting on the bench in Colorado, and not a single one would comment for this story, a court spokesman said. Two retired state Supreme Court justices even declined to comment. And Rebecca Love Kourlis, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice who now leads the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, agreed to comment as long as this article made clear her organization is strictly nonpartisan.

“Judges are not politicians, susceptible to bullying or peer pressure or majority will,” Love Kourlis wrote in an e-mail. “If they were, the structure would collapse. So, even to walk that path is to demean them, the system and the Rule of Law.”

Of course, criticism of judges is neither new nor — even to the most staunch defenders of the judiciary — is it inherently wrong.

Lawyers disagree with judges’ interpretations of the law. Appeals courts overrule lower courts. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling on a death penalty case by the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania because, the nation’s highest court said, the chief justice in Pennsylvania had a conflict of interest that could have impaired his judgment.

To Love Kourlis and others, this is the way critiques of judges should go. They should be based on rational legal arguments, not fits of passion.

“If a judge makes an inappropriate ruling, there are appellate remedies,” she wrote in an e-mail.

But, Dubofsky and Aisenberg said many attacks on judges in recent years are something new — something that seeks to bend the judiciary to serve a political cause. After all, Aisenberg said, complaints about “activist judges” only come when one political side or another disagrees with the outcome. No one suggests judicial activism when a decision goes in their favor.

Colorado is familiar with these kinds of fights. In 2010, groups campaigned to oust four state Supreme Court justices during a retention election, mostly by citing rulings of the justices that conservatives disagreed with.

“If some of them do not lose their seat,” libertarian think tank leader Jon Caldara said at the time, “then the retention system is an absolute joke.”

But Trump’s attacks on U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel — who is presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University — are particularly troubling to Dubofsky because, she said, they are an instance of a politician trying to use his national stage to influence a case to the benefit of his personal business interests.

Aisenberg said there has always been some politicization of the judiciary, even in Colorado, where a nominating commission first screens judicial candidates before an elected leader appoints them.

But he said the risk of these attacks are twofold. While judges are generally thick-skinned, he said the criticism can’t help but affect them and possibly influence future decisions. Even worse, he said, is that leaders may see judgeships even more so as political offices — meaning those appointed and those doing the appointing will be inclined to use them for partisan ends.

“I don’t think it’s going to get better,” he said. “It shouldn’t be like that. It should be that the judges are impartial and those who appoint them are impartial.”
...................................................................................................................................................................