Three Clinton Appointees to Decide Fate of Trump Travel Ban

The three appellate judges who will consider President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban all got their posts from former President Bill Clinton.

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the case in Seattle Monday morning. The judges will consider the ruling by a U.S. District Court judge in Hawaii, who put a nationwide hold on the executive order, which called for a temporary freeze on travel from six terrorism-compromised countries.

Trump issued the executive order in March after a different 9th Circuit panel halted his original order affecting seven countries. But the revised order, which dropped Iraq from the list of affected countries, met with the same result at the trial court level.

Regardless of the ruling by the current panel, the case seems destined for the Supreme Court, which now has a full complement of justices with the confirmation of Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The randomly selected judges on the notoriously liberal-leaning 9th Circuit are:

Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Hawkins. He assumed the bench in 1994 and then took semi-retired “senior” status in 2010.

Hawkins dissented from a high-profile strip search case involving a public middle school in Safford, Arizona. The trial court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the student’s parents, ruling that school officials enjoyed immunity. A three-judge panel affirmed that decision, but the full court agreed to reconsider the decision.

Hawkins dissented from that decision, arguing that school officials were within their rights to search the student as a matter of safety.

Although he wrote that it was “a close call” because of the “humiliation and degradation” that the student endured, Hawkins argued that school officials in 2003 were justified in searching the 13-year-old girl suspected of hiding ibuprofen in her underwear.

“I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students, he wrote. “I would find this search constitutional.”

The U.S. Supreme Court later voted 8-1 to find the school officials had violated the girl’s rights.

Circuit Judge Ronald Gould. He took office in 1999 after a career in private practice. He dissented in a high-profile case this year on a decision to affirm a ruling by a district judge to disallow controversial lawyer Larry Klayman from representing cattle rancher Cliven Bundy.

Bundy, who engaged in an armed standoff with federal authorities amid a dispute over grazing fees, wanted to add Klayman to his legal team. Although prosecutors did not object, the judge refused to grant Klyayman privileges in the court, citing ethics complaints that Klayman has faced in other jurisdictions.

Gould dissented, noting the Klayman, founder of the group Freedom Watch, has not been disbarred or suspended. He wrote that Bundy’s attorney of record is a good lawyer.

“But the long course of American justice shows that sometimes representation by multiple attorneys is key to a robust defense,” he wrote, citing the O.J. Simpson murder case as an example.

Gould added: “To be sure, Klayman’s aggressive tactics are likely to irritate the district court judge. But in a tough case with experienced prosecutors, forceful advocacy can be necessary to a full defense.”

Bundy is awaiting trial.

Circuit Judge Richard Paez. He took office in 2000 after a long confirmation battle and concerns that he would tilt the already-liberal court further left.

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One of the senators who led the opposition to Paez’s nomination was Jeff Sessions, who now is the attorney general and whose lawyers will argue the government’s case on Monday. Sessions cited Paez’s decision, as a district judge in Los Angles, to accept a plea agreement in the case of Democratic fundraiser John Huang. Sessions argued that Paez flouted federal sentencing guidelines in the case.

As an appeals court judge, Paez wrote the majority opinion in a 2011 decision that upheld a judge’s ruling striking down key parts of an Arizona law that cracked down on illegal immigration.

Two years earlier, Paez held that a San Francisco resolution urging the Vatican to withdraw a directive against adoptions by same-sex couples did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.