Donald Trump recently celebrated a milestone — 150 federal court judges confirmed, including 43 Appeals Court judges.
Liberals were late to wake up to the fact that while they were obsessing over supposed Russia collusion, Trump was reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation.
The notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit has not yet flipped, with 16 Democrat-nominated and 12-Republican nominated Judges, but it’s getting there with two new nominations, including one opposed by California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. Courthouse News reports:
President Donald Trump announced six new judicial nominees on Friday, including two to seats on the once reliably liberal Ninth Circuit and four to federal courts in California.One of the nominees to the Ninth Circuit will be familiar to senators, as Trump has now three times chosen Patrick Bumatay for a federal judgeship. Trump first chose Bumatay, a prosecutor in the Southern District of California, for a seat on the Ninth Circuit in 2018, but the Senate never took action on the nomination.Trump tapped him for a judgeship again earlier this year, this time for a position on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.Bumatay, who is openly gay, currently leads the appellate and narcotics sections of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, and worked as counselor to the attorney general in 2018, advising on opioid strategy and other issues.California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, both Democrats who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, raised concerns about Bumatay’s lack of judicial experience during his first pass at the Ninth Circuit position.In a statement, Harris said she will oppose Bumatay’s nomination going forward, citing a “troubling prosecutorial record” and inexperience.
Carrie Severino writes at National Review, Who is Patrick Bumatay?
41 years old, Bumatay graduated cum laude from Yale University in 2000, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2006, where he was articles editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy — a leading law journal for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship… Bumatay has been an active member of The Federalist Society since law school.
The Wall Street Journal says Trump is right to renominate Bumatay:
Readers may recall that the White House first nominated Mr. Bumatay in the last Congress but failed to renominate him earlier this year after complaints from California’s Democratic Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. The new White House counsel team thought it might win some greater cooperation from the Democrats by listening to their concerns about Mr. Bumatay.The White House instead nominated Daniel Bress for the Ninth Circuit, but the Senators opposed him too. Judge Bress was confirmed in any case. The White House then nominated Mr. Bumatay for a district-court position, but the Senators opposed him for that seat as well.The White House has now given up hope for judicial comity and nominated Mr. Bumatay again for the Ninth Circuit. The 41-year-old Filipino-American is currently a federal prosecutor in San Diego. He has also worked at the Justice Department as a counselor to the Attorney General on criminal issues, as well as the Office of Legal Policy. By all accounts he is a top-notch legal mind and constitutional originalist.
Appeals Court Judges matter. So do elections.
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