While you were watching Gordon Sondland, Trump flipped the 11th Circuit

“While you were focused on ….” Trump continued to remake the federal judiciary, is now something of a series here:

In today’s news from the battlefield, Trump just captured the 11th Circuit:

Even as the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday heard crucial testimony from pivotal witness Gordon Sondland, the Senate voted to confirm Trump’s latest appointee to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a regional appeals court handling cases from Georgia, Alabama and Florida.The action represented a new milestone in Trump’s dramatic reshaping of the federal judiciary, with Republican-appointed judges now in the majority in the 11th Circuit, whose majority before Trump took office in January 2017 had been Democratic appointees. Republican-appointed justices tend to be conservative, while Democratic-named judges tend to be liberal.This marks the third time that Trump has been able to engineer the ideological “flip” of one of the nation’s 13 federal appeals courts, which exert considerable power one level below the U.S. Supreme Court. The other two to “flip” were the Manhattan-based 2nd Circuit and the Philadelphia-based 3th Circuit, both of which also had Democratic-appointed majorities when Trump became president.

Reuters prepared this handy graphic:

Meanwhile, Democrats are mired in the Ukrainian countryside, bogged down in faulty memories, rank speculation, inadmissible opinion ….

… and bad manners.

Tags: Trump Appointments, Trump Impeachment

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