On Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump tweeted that the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was a “complete and total disaster.”
President Trump was angry because of a Nov. 19 decision by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar. The President told reporters on Nov. 20 that Tigar’s decision to block a Trump Administration order that denied asylum to illegal immigrants until at least Dec. 19, when Tigar will hold a hearing, was a “disgrace.”
Trump also called Tigar an “Obama judge.” Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts publicly said Trump’s categorization of judges as “Obama judges” was wrong, a comment that led to the president’s Thanksgiving tweet. In his tweet, Trump wrote that judges who “legislate security” are “making our country unsafe.”
The tweet also commented on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal where the motion was filed. The President said the Ninth Circuit is “out of control,” has a “horrible reputation,” and “is used to get an almost guaranteed result,” an implication that people opposed to conservative policy go to the Ninth Circuit because of its history of liberal rulings.
Trump was frustrated because any appeal on the final ruling by Tigar will be heard by the Ninth Circuit court. Then, it might go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a history of overruling Ninth Circuit decisions.
Trump’s rage focused on the court’s liberal history, but the San Francisco-based court has so many other serious issues that there have been numerous attempts to break up the court.
Although there are 11 appeals courts, the Ninth Circuit has jurisdiction over about one-fifth of the American population. The nine states the Ninth Circuit covers have 64.3 million people. The circuit court with jurisdiction over an area with the second largest population, the 11th Circuit, handles cases from three states (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) with 36.3 million people. In addition, the Ninth Circuit has the most judges — 29. The Fifth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over three states (Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas), is second with 17.
Do you want to know how long people concerned about a fair justice system have been concerned that the Ninth Circuit was too big to be efficient? Guess again. The answer is more than 70 years.
“Even since the ’40s, various members of Congress and others have thought the court was too big and so wanted to reconfigure it in different ways,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Washington Examiner in the article “Six things to know about breaking up the 9th Circuit.”
Dems Back Bad Court
If your company had 11 divisions and one was far more inefficient than the others, what would you do?
You would probably make dramatic changes to the inefficient division. In applying this analogy to the appeals court system, the people in charge of our court system SHOULD break up the Ninth Circuit, but the Democrats have preserved the court for political reasons.
“GOP lawmakers whose constituents live within the 9th’s expansive appellate jurisdiction have repeatedly introduced legislation that would carve a 12th Circuit out of states currently covered by the 9th,” reported the Washington Examiner. “But Democrats have argued that efforts to divide the West Coast circuit are politically motivated given the historic liberal leanings of its judges, and support or opposition for the proposal has broken down along largely partisan lines.”
The Democrats are wrong that arguments to break up the Ninth Circuit are based solely on politics. The numbers don’t lie and they’re NOT political.
You would think that the court’s 29 judges would negate the Ninth Circuit’s larger caseload, but they haven’t. As the Washington Examiner puts it, “litigants in the 9th must wait significantly longer to have their cases resolved.”
In backing a proposal to break up the Ninth Circuit in 2016, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said the average turnaround time was 15 months. “The Ninth Circuit is by far the most overturned and overburdened court in the country, with a 77 percent reversal rate,” Ducey said.
The Washington Examiner also notes that the Ninth Circuit is less likely than the other circuit courts to respond to plaintiffs and defendants who want their appeal heard by the entire court because getting 29 judges to hear a case is logistically difficult. This is unfair to many litigants.
Anthony Kennedy, a Ninth Circuit judge before he became a Supreme Court justice, testified in a 2007 congressional hearing that he favored breaking up the court because a 29-member court is too large and dispersed to maintain collegiality. He basically criticized the court’s work. Colleagues Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Stevens, Clarence Thomas also said publicly they favored a breakup.
The Ninth Circuit’s high reversal rate is caused by its liberal bias and the poor quality of its work. A Vox article “How the 9th Circuit became conservatives’ least favorite court” details the court’s long list of liberal decisions on issues like gay marriage, the Second Amendment, and the Pledge of Allegiance. The Washington Times article “Supreme Court likely to rack up more reversals for West Coast’s 9th Circuit” reports that in the last decade the Supreme Court has ruled on 155 Ninth Circuit cases, about three times the number from any other court.
In 1929, the Eighth Circuit court was split into the Eighth and 10th circuit courts. In 1973, a congressionally-chartered commission recommended that two inefficient circuit courts, the Fifth and the Ninth, be broken up. The Fifth was split into the Fifth and 11th circuit courts. The Ninth was left intact.
The Ninth Circuit court is much larger and more inefficient today than the Fifth and Eighth were when they were split up. It should be split up to improve justice for the 64.3 million people it serves.
