While Democrats were wasting their time last week in impeachment hearings where everyone denied the quid pro quo they’re looking for, President Donald Trump scored another victory in the courts.
According to the Daily Signal:
As the House engaged in partisan bickering, the Senate voted to confirm Barbara Lagoa to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta on a bipartisan vote of 80 to 15 on Wednesday. The circuit—which handles cases out of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia—now has a 7-to-5 majority of Republican appointees.
That makes the third appeals court that Trump has flipped to a Republican majority.
Since taking office in January 2017, Trump also has been able to change the makeup of the Manhattan, New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to a 7-to-6 Republican-appointee majority and the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit to an 8-to-6 majority of appointees of Republican presidents.
Trump has now appointed a total of 164 federal judges in three years – more than Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan appointed in two terms (and George H.W. Bush in his one).
The so-called resistance has been doing everything they can to slow this pace of confirmations with no success.
In Article III courts, where appointments are permanent, nearly half of Trump’s appointees have been appointed with greater than 25% opposition, reflecting hyper-partisanship in the Trump era. Only 8% of Obama’s nominees faced such opposition, and only 4% of Bush’s. Seventy-five percent of Trump’s appointees for the U.S. Court of Appeals were confirmed with greater than 25% opposition, while only 9% of Obama’s judges were. Historically, from 1979-1980, 97% of appointees to both aforementioned courts, and even the Supreme Court, had no opposition.
Trump’s victories in the courts are impossible for the left to deny. VICE called it “arguably the biggest accomplishment of Trump’s time in office.” VOX credited Trump with “taking over” America’s courts, and the Washington Post said that Trump was “winning the race to reshape the nation’s courts” in a report from last year.
And the winning hasn’t stopped since.
