COURTS/GOP/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “The month of September 2018 will undoubtedly go down in U.S. legal history for the rancorous furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, regardless of whether Kavanaugh, a judge on the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is ultimately confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But in much quieter fashion, four judges whom President Trump appointed to federal appellate courts issued rulings in September that laid the groundwork for potentially momentous challenges to established precedent on such hot-button social issues as gun control, religious displays and zoning rights for religious groups. Law professor Arthur Hellman of the University of Pittsburgh, a guru of the federal judiciary, spotted the trend when I interviewed him for a podcast that accompanies ‘Courting Change,’ a Reuters interactive analysis of President Trump’s impact on the circuit courts. You’ve probably heard the marquee statistic that the president and his White House counsel – coordinating closely with Senate Republicans and elite conservative legal groups including the Federalist Society – have already placed 26 judges on federal circuit courts. They’ve set a scalding pace. President Obama appointed 55 appellate judges, but it took him eight years. Trump has appointed nearly half as many in less than a quarter of that time.”
–Alison Frankel, “Trump appellate judges are paving the way to challenge precedent,” Reuters, October 3, 2018 3:03 pm