The court has too many judges, leading to backlogs and inconsistency in applying the law
By Mark Brnovich and Ilya Shapiro | The Wall Street Journal
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are published for discussions purposes only.)
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.
