The Impact Of President Trump’s Judicial Appointments

Yesterday The Daily Caller reported that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the Trump administration can continue stripping federal funding from clinics that offer abortions. Note that he did not shut down the clinics–he just said that they would not receive federal funding. That ruling is an example of the impact President Trump’s judicial appointments have had on the Ninth Circuit.

Yesterday Fox News reported:

President Trump has reshaped the “notoriously liberal” U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, according to Carrie Severino, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network’s chief counsel and policy director, who noted it was often referred to as the “Ninth Circus.”

The former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made the comments Monday on “Fox & Friends” in response to a Los Angeles Times article titled “Trump has flipped the 9th Circuit — and some new judges are causing a ‘shock wave.’”

The article said that when President Trump talks about his accomplishments in office, “he frequently mentions his aggressive makeover of a key sector of the federal judiciary — the circuit courts of appeal, where he has appointed 51 judges to lifetime jobs in three years.”

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompasses California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Guam, Oregon and Washington, was a liberal bastion that has been aggressively reshaped into a more moderate court by the Trump administration.

The Daily Caller notes:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) followed the decision in June by alerting clinics that it would enforce the administration’s ban. Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X federal family planning program, thereby forgoing about $60 million a year, in August 2019 rather than comply with this decision.

The Daily Caller article includes a screenshot of a comment by Leana Wen, M.D., a former president of Planned Parenthood. She comments that she will continue to fight so that millions of women across the country can receive care. Note the vocabulary used here–abortion is being framed as care. In a stretch of logic I suppose you could consider abortion care for the mother, but it is definitely not care for the baby. By controlling the vocabulary, Dr. Wen seeks to control the argument. The government should not be funding clinics that lead women to abortions–they should be funding clinics that lead women to prenatal care and support for their pregnancy.