Trump is having his revenge on California as he remakes once-liberal 9th Circuit court (LAT)

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-22/could-the-changing-makeup-of-the-9th-circuit-end-california-exceptionalism

Trump is having his revenge on California as he remakes once-liberal 9th Circuit court
By JULIA WICK
DEC. 22, 2019 12:09 PM

There are the big, juicy political developments, of the sort that require double-sized headlines on front pages and, eventually, their own chapters in history books.

And there are the quiet, incremental ones. But both matter.

Last week, the world watched as articles of impeachment against President Trump were first introduced in Congress, five days before they were approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a historic vote.

But something else also happened in the Capitol last week that could affect California, and other western states, for decades to come.

The U.S. Senate confirmed two more Trump nominees to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a powerful federal appeals court long regarded as a liberal bastion. (The reality of that reputation has starkly waned in recent years, but more on that below.)

Judges Lawrence VanDyke and Patrick Bumatay, who are both in their 40s, will serve lifetime appointments. Their ascent to the bench means that Trump appointees now account for more than a third of the active judges on the very same court that the president has repeatedly attacked as being adversarial to his agenda.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit is inherently no more powerful than any of the other 12 circuit courts, but it is a whole lot bigger. It has jurisdiction over an area that spans roughly 1.4 million square miles and encompasses more than 60 million people in nine western states and two Pacific Island territories. It’s played an outsize role in American political discourse — serving as both a boogeyman to conservatives, and an icon of judicial activism to those on the left.