[Reuters] When President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, the federal appeals court based in Virginia was known as one of the most conservative benches in the country.
Two Obama terms later, Democratic appointees hold a 10-5 majority on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which issued a groundbreaking ruling this April backing transgender rights.
The shift to the left on the court, which hears cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, highlights a widely overlooked aspect of Obama's legacy.
His appointments of dozens of judges to the country's influential federal appeals courts have tilted the judiciary in a liberal direction that will influence rulings for years to come and be further entrenched if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins this November's presidential election.
A Reuters review of rulings by the courts over the last two years shows Obama’s appointees to the appeals courts have influenced major legal battles likely to ultimately reach the Supreme Court.
Obama-appointed judges have voted in favor of broad civil rights protections, major Obama administration regulations and gun regulations and against Republican-backed voting rules.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
