How Trump has tipped the scales in America's most powerful courts

How Trump has tipped the scales in America's most powerful courts
Tom McCarthy examines how three appeals courts are becoming more conservative with the arrival of judges picked by Trump – and what that means for cases on issues like voting rights
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/01/how-trump-tipped-scales-supreme-court-judges-voting-rights

The US supreme court may be the highest in the land, but because of the small number of cases it hears each year, justice usually does not get that far. Final rulings in the vast majority of federal lawsuits are issued one tier lower, in the 13 appeals courts spread across the country.

And this is now where key policy questions increasingly land, because partisanship has slowed legislative dealmaking in the United States in recent years.

It is in these appeals courts where judges serving lifetime appointments have extraordinary power over issues as public as the climate crisis and as private as the right to choose.

That longer-term trend has converged with a much more recent development: Donald Trump’s appointment of a record number of appeals court judges installed with unprecedented speed, as part of a grand project coordinated with conservative legal activists to remake the federal bench for generations to come. Nearly 30% of the 179 active circuit court judges are now Trump appointees.

Owing to this extraordinary push, the ideological makeup of the courts has slowly tipped in a conservative direction. Since 2017, three of the courts have “flipped” from a majority of judges appointed by a Democratic president to a Republican-appointment majority.

The US court of appeals for the eleventh circuit, which oversees cases in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, has gone from an 8-3 majority of judges appointed by Democrats, with one vacancy, to a 7-5 majority of judges appointed by Republicans.

Elsewhere, Trump has “flipped” the second and third Circuits, and he has effectively flipped a fourth court, the ninth circuit, some analysts think.

“I still like to think there’s a bottom line for even conservative Trump appointees on the court of appeals, that there’s a line there that they won’t cross over, that we’ll remain a country of laws and not men,” said Sheldon Goldman, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who focuses on the federal bench. “But who knows?”

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