Posted January 11, 2018 9:55 am by Comments

By Mark Brnovich, Ilya Shapiro Mark Brnovich, Ilya Shapiro

President Trump’s frustration with federal judges,
particularly on immigration issues, has led him to join calls to
“break up” the sprawling Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, based in San Francisco. “It just shows how broken
and unfair our Court System is,” the president tweeted this
week after an unfavorable ruling from a district judge, “when
the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th
Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher
courts.”

Splitting up the court would be the right decision, but not for
the political reasons Republicans often invoke.

The Ninth Circuit has been a boogeyman for conservatives for
decades. The only federal appellate court that already had a
majority of Democrat-appointed judges when Barack Obama took
office, it epitomizes the progressive legal vanguard on
environmental regulation, same-sex marriage, gun control,
immigration and almost everything else.

The court has too many
judges, leading to backlogs and inconsistency in applying the
law.

But splitting the court wouldn’t necessarily push
jurisprudence in a conservative direction. The Ninth
Circuit’s ideological tilt is a function not of geography but
history. To reflect the growing population of Western states, and
thus the caseload, Congress added 10 judgeships to the Ninth
Circuit in 1978, nearly doubling its size. Jimmy Carter filled
those seats.

Later, most semiretired judges on the Ninth …Read the Rest

Source:: Cato Institute

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