As the impeachment drama sucks up all the energy in the House of Representatives and consumes the attention of the political press, Senate Republicans are taking advantage of the legislative process grinding to a halt -- despite Nancy Pelosi's vow that impeachment would not halt progress on other important issues. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the upper chamber's judiciary committee have teed up a nonstop merry-go-round of judicial confirmations, which is spinning ever closer to achieving 'Cocaine Mitch's' stated goal of filling every single vacancy on the federal bench by the end of President Trump's term. They've been grinding away, making steady, consequential, lasting progress:
And, here's what the appeals courts looked like when Obama left office:
(From 2016 graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2blUhmV)
When Trump took office, only four of the 13 appeals courts had a majority of GOP-appointed judges. Now seven of them do. Read more about what it all means here: reut.rs/2KUCJxZ
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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...
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