Vaping Congressman Compares Trump U Case to Muslim Judging American Sniper
While Donald Trump has stopped explaining his racially-based attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, his supporters have soldiered on. That includes vaping congressman Duncan Hunter, who creatively defended Trump’s remarks on Wednesday by imagining a trial featuring deceased American Sniper Chris Kyle.
“What I like to do is take these arguments out to there logical extremes,” said Hunter on The Sean Hannity Show. From Buzzfeed:
“So let’s say that Chris Kyle, the American sniper, is still alive and he was on trial for something, and his judge was a Muslim-American of Iraqi descent. Here you have Chris Kyle, who’s killed a whole bunch of bad guys in Iraq. Would that be a fair trial for Chris Kyle? If you had that judge there? Probably not. And Chris Kyle could probably say, ‘this guy’s not gonna like me.’”
Back in reality, of course, a sniper who killed “bad guys in Iraq” would have no reason to believe a Muslim-American judge would be pro-bad guy and anti-Marine, unless that sniper were bigoted as hell. Hunter and Hannity, however, weren’t quite finished.
“But the left has made this case for a long time,” said Hannity. “For example, somebody should have a jury of their peers and if they happen to be a black American or Hispanic American that they shouldn’t have an all-white jury, correct? Isn’t that a similar argument?”
“Right, you could look at the O.J. trial too, was that fair?” replied Hunter.
As contradictory arguments, Hunter either believes the O.J. Simpson trial was fair or his hypothetical Kyle trial would be. Legally, however, race isn’t grounds for a juror’s exclusion and religion can’t compel a judge’s recusal. To take Hunter’s argument to an even more extreme logical extreme, let’s imagine a Roman Catholic judging an abortion case, as five Catholic Supreme Court Justices currently are.