A Conservative Plan to Weaponize the Federal Courts,by Linda Greenhouse
'Even though there’s been nothing subtle about the current push to fill dozens of judicial vacancies kept open by the Republican-controlled Senate during the final years of the Obama administration, a document now making the rounds inside the Beltway is head-snapping. It is a proposal by a leading conservative constitutional scholar to double or even triple the number of authorized judgeships on the federal Courts of Appeals, now fixed by law at 179.
Why so many, and why now? The author, Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University, a founder and the current board chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, declares his goal boldly: “undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.”
The 37-page document is styled as a “Memorandum to the Senate and the House of Representatives.” On one level, it tells us little that we don’t already know: that the Republicans, seemingly unable to accomplish much of anything else, are desperate to gain control of the federal courts. Sure, President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed 80 years ago with his plan to remake the Supreme Court to his liking by adding up to six new justices. But that’s evidently no reason not to aim just a little lower with a court-packing plan for the federal appeals and trial courts. (Professor Calabresi also advocates adding 185 District Court judgeships to the current 673.) There is something bracing about the naked activism of a leader of a movement that has spent the past generation railing against judicial activism.
In his memorandum, Professor Calabresi explains that when President Obama came into office, 10 of the 13 federal appeals courts had majorities of Republican-appointed judges. By the time the Obama administration ended eight years later, that number had shrunk to four, with results that Professor Calabresi regards as calamitous. Calling out individual Democratic-appointed judges by name, he gives as examples last year’s decision by the Fourth Circuit invalidating North Carolina’s voter ID requirement, and a decision by the federal appeals court in Washington rejecting challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rule, as “another instance of the administrative state run amok.”
In ordinary times, one might expect a document like this to be passed quietly among like-minded Capitol Hill staff members. But conservatives these days put their cards on the table.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/conservatives-weaponize-federal-courts.html?
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