In case after case during this period, the Supreme Court rejected rulings from a federal appeals court with a reputation for being the most conservative in the country.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has become fertile ground for legal challenges to Biden administration policies brought by Republican state attorneys general and conservative legal powerhouses alike.
But cases that progressed one step higher did not perform as well.
All nine justices voted to dismiss a case against abortion pills. Eight upheld the federal ban on gun ownership for domestic abusers. Seven rejected a challenge that could have brought down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
In total, the Supreme Court reversed or vacated the 5th Circuit in eight of the 11 appeals heard this term.
The results rein in a legal system that has delivered sizable victories to conservative plaintiffs as it has moved steadily to the right in recent years.
Former President Trump made the appointment of conservative judges a priority during his tenure in the White House, solidifying a rightward trend in the 5th Circuit by appointing six judges to his bench, a substantial number only surpassed by Trump’s appointees to another court in resource. So far, President Biden has nominated two 5th Circuit judges.
Today, 12 of the court’s 17 active-duty judges were appointed by Republican presidents.
The Biden administration has frequently appealed unfavorable rulings from the 5th Circuit to the nation’s highest court. Disputes range from cultural war battles to attempts to recover the “administrative state”.
And for the most part, the Justice Department has succeeded, even with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
The justices unanimously reversed the 5th Circuit ruling that would have restricted access to mifepristone, the Supreme Court retreats into fertile conservative ground
on the abortion pill, in a lawsuit filed by a group of doctors and anti-abortion associations.
All nine justices agreed that the plaintiffs never had the right to sue, known as standing, preserving access to the abortion pill without ever getting to the merits of the case.
Rejecting one of the challengers’ theories, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said its adoption would require “radical doctrinal changes” that could not be contained.
“We refuse to let the Federal Judiciary follow this unknown path,” he wrote to the court. “This path apparently would not end until virtually all citizens had the legitimacy to challenge virtually all government actions they did not like.”
Similarly, the Supreme Court rejected the 5th Circuit ruling that found the Biden administration coerced social media companies to take down content that authorities considered to be misinformation.
“The Fifth Circuit relied on the District Court’s factual conclusions, many of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous,” Judge Amy Coney Barrett, one of Trump’s appointees, wrote for the six-judge majority.
The inferior ruling gained support only from the court’s top three conservatives: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
The 5th Circuit, however, did not just suffer losses.
The Supreme Court upheld rulings that struck down the Trump-era bump stock ban, invalidated the Securities and Exchange Commission’s internal enforcement system and rejected an undocumented immigrant’s documentation challenge to his removal order.
But those cases were a minority, with nearly three-quarters of the 5th Circuit appeals heard by the Supreme Court this term now expunged.
Regarding the Second Amendment, eight justices in United States v. Rahimi voted that the 5th Circuit went too far in striking down a federal provision that made it a crime to possess firearms while under a domestic violence restraining order. Only Thomas agreed with the trial court.
The Supreme Court upheld the provision, handing a victory to the Biden administration and chastising the 5th Circuit for interpreting the high court’s expanded Second Amendment test too broadly.
“This error caused the panel to kill a strawman,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The 5th Circuit must now confront how retaliation impacts a host of other Second Amendment challenges.
Perhaps most notable is the fact that the court must decide whether to uphold its previous opinion, nullifying some applications of the federal crime of gun possession by illegal drug users. Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was convicted of the charge last month, although his appeal is pending in a different circuit.
A 5th Circuit panel on Tuesday heard oral arguments in one of its pending challenges to the disposition. Rahimi has been mentioned more than a dozen times.
“Now with the benefit of Rahimi of the Supreme Court, I think they want us to look at this from every different point of view we can think of in order to present the best opinion possible,” U.S. Circuit Judge Kurt Englehardt, a Trump appointee, noted in the discussion.
At the Supreme Court’s direction, the 5th Circuit will also review its decision rejecting a challenge to the Texas law regulating social media platforms’ content moderation policies, which was ignored by accusations that Big Tech censored conservatives.
All nine justices agreed to return the case and a similar case that arose from a different lower court. But six justices singled out the 5th Circuit for straying in its analysis of the First Amendment, with the majority opinion providing extensive guidance to avoid future errors.
“[T]There has been enough litigation to know that the Fifth Circuit, if it stayed the course, would err on at least one significant entry into facial analysis,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
