The Ninth Circuit is a disaster.
Nobody can believe these decisions we’re getting from the Ninth Circuit, it’s a disgrace.
The Ninth Circuit — everybody knows it — it's totally out of control.
When Trump took office, most of the Ninth Circuit’s judges had been appointed by Democratic
presidents. And they overruled some of Trump’s most provocative executive orders: The travel
ban, emergency funding for a border wall, they all stopped here.
It's very hard to win at the Ninth Circuit, if not impossible.
But that’s changing.
Trump has already added seven new judges to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and by
the end of his first term there’s a good chance the Ninth Circuit could look very different.
We usually think of the three branches of government as the president, Congress, and
the Supreme Court.
But it’s here, in the federal courts, where President Trump is building his longest-lasting
legacy.
You know, when I got in, we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed. It was like
a big, beautiful present to all of us.
Federal courts hear lawsuits involving the Constitution or laws made by Congress.
Say a city pays a female employee less than her male counterpart — that violates the
Equal Pay Act, a federal law.
So that case would start here, where all federal lawsuits start, in a District Court. There’s
at least one in every state.
For example, California is home to 61 judges who serve on the state’s four District Courts.
If the case is appealed, it moves up to the aptly named Court of Appeals. It’s made
up of 13 Circuit Courts, and they each hear cases from different parts of the country.
So a case that started in California will move up to the Ninth Circuit Court, because
they hear cases from the western part of the US.
If it’s appealed again, it’ll go to the Supreme Court.
But they only hear less 100 cases a year. The Circuit Courts? They hear 50,000.
For most federal cases, these judges give the final, precedent-setting ruling.
They’re kind of a big deal.
And every single judge here is nominated by the president and serves for life.
Now here’s a chart showing how many Circuit Court judges a president confirmed, by what
time in their presidency. There’s Ronald Reagan’s. And this is George H. W. Bush’s.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. All pretty consistent, right?
Now here’s Barack Obama’s.
Look how it totally flatlines in his last two years.
That’s because all federal judges are nominated by the president but then have to be confirmed
by a vote in the Senate.
And after the 2014 election, Republicans gained control in the Senate and Mitch McConnell
stopped holding votes on nearly all of Obama’s court picks.
From the Supreme Court all the way down to the District Courts.
So when Trump took office, not only did he have a ton of vacant seats to fill, he had
a Republican-controlled Senate to help fill them. Quickly.
In fact, Trump has appointed more Circuit Court judges in the first half of his first
term than any other modern president.
But his judges are different.
This is where all the judges nominated by each president fall on a scale between liberal
and conservative, determined by their past political donations.
Here’s the median score for those judges.
You can see that appointees on both sides have moved further to the left and right of
their party’s medians. But Trump’s median pick is more conservative than Obama’s was
liberal.
And more conservative than his Republican predecessors’.
And if you look at the ideological distribution of judges appointed by previous presidents,
you can see tails at either end. Both Republican and Democratic presidents appointed some judges
that leaned the other way.
But Trump? Not really.
Traditionally, presidents need to work with the Senate.
If a judgeship opens up in, say, Texas, the nominee would need the approval of the Texas
senators. No approval, no vote.
It makes presidents compromise with the opposite party and prevents them from stacking the
courts with super-partisan judges.
That’s why these past presidents had to have a spectrum of judges.
But when Trump nominated two men for seats on the Ninth Circuit — the court that keeps
overturning Trump’s executive orders — the two Democratic senators from California opposed
them both, calling them “far outside the judicial mainstream.”
One because of some controversial writings in college and the other because of his prior
work as a defense lawyer, including for oil companies where he argued climate change isn’t
real.
Normally this would mean they would never get a vote, let alone a hearing.
But Republicans aren’t honoring this century-old informal rule, and judges are being confirmed
without the support of either home-state senator. Including those two on the Ninth.
Trump has now appointed seven new judges to the Ninth Circuit: one because Obama’s nominee
wasn’t allowed a vote and four without the approval of home-state senators. He’s expected
to appoint at least two more judges before his first term is over.
This is what the Circuit Courts looked like when Trump became president at the beginning
of 2017.
And here’s how the courts look halfway through 2019.
It’s expected that every president gets to have an impact on the federal courts. That’s
normal.
But Trump only got to fill these seats because of McConnell’s refusal to hold a vote on
Obama’s picks.
None of these Trump picks had the support of both senators from their home state.
And as a group, Trump’s picks are more conservative than his Republican predecessors’.
In 2018, Mitch McConnell laid out his goals for the federal judiciary in a radio interview.
And his plan is working.