Latest news with #federalappealscourt
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump judicial nominee Bove clears Senate panel despite Democratic protest
By Andrew Goudsward WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. Senate panel on Thursday advanced the nomination of Donald Trump's former personal lawyer to be a federal appeals court judge over protests from Democrats, who accuse him of using aggressive tactics to enforce the U.S. president's agenda at the Justice Department. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously supported the nomination of Emil Bove for a lifetime appointment on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, sending the nomination to the full Senate. Bove currently serves as a top Justice Department official. The hearing devolved into partisan rancor when the panel's Republican chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, cut off debate on Bove's nomination. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a Democrat, shouted that Grassley was violating the committee's rules as Republicans cast their votes. The other Democrats walked out of the hearing. "This is outrageous that you're not allowing senators to have their fair say," Booker told Grassley. "What are you afraid of?" Grassley accused Booker of "obstruction." Bove's nomination drew fierce opposition from Democrats and many former Justice Department employees, more than 900 of whom signed a letter accusing him of undermining the integrity of the department. Bove's defenders have pointed to his background as a federal terrorism prosecutor in New York and his work countering drug cartels and other threats. Trump named Bove to a senior post at the Justice Department after he helped defend Trump against three criminal cases brought against him during his years out of power. Bove came under scrutiny over his role in firing career prosecutors who worked on cases arising from the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his order to drop a federal corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. A former Justice Department lawyer last month accused Bove of suggesting the government may defy court rulings against the Trump administration's deportation efforts. Bove has said he cannot recall making the statement and denied being a Trump "enforcer."
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
West Virginia's near-total abortion pill ban upheld by federal court
A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed West Virginia to restrict access to mifepristone, the pill used to end pregnancies that has emerged as a focal point of legal battles over abortion. The decision marks the first time a federal appeals court has allowed a state to strictly limit the drug, teeing up a key test of states' powers to ban medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Washington Post
Justin Wolfe, who confessed to 2001 murder for hire, could get new trial
Twenty-four years after his arrest, and nine years since his handwritten confession led to his conviction for murder and drug dealing, a Prince William County man accused of murder-for-hire in the fatal shooting of a fellow marijuana merchant may get a new trial. A federal appeals court said he should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and have his case heard by a jury.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Appeals Court Delays Decision on Contempt Plan in Deportation Case
In April, a federal appeals court in Washington took what seemed to be a fairly normal step: It temporarily put on hold a trial judge's plan to begin contempt proceedings against the Trump administration to determine whether officials had violated his order stopping flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. The move by the appeals court, known as an administrative stay, was supposed to have been an incremental measure intended to buy it time as it considered a more substantial type of stay — one designed to pause the case as the court dug into the merits of the contempt proposal laid out by the trial judge, James E. Boasberg. But three months later, the three-judge panel that put the stay in place has done nothing at all to push the case forward, allowing it to languish in a kind of legal limbo. And the panel's lack of action has caught the eye of some legal experts — if only because as it has sat on the case, new evidence has emerged that the Trump administration may have disobeyed Judge Boasberg's order. 'It's very unusual,' said Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. 'An appeals court may need hours or days to figure out an administrative stay, but it doesn't need weeks and certainly not months.' The pause imposed by the three judges, who sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, emerged from the first and one of the most contentious cases involving President Trump's use of a powerful wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelans accused of being members of a street gang to a notorious prison in El Salvador. On March 15, the Trump administration sent the first set of flights carrying immigrants to El Salvador, prompting an emergency hearing in front of Judge Boasberg. At the hearing, the judge told the Justice Department that any planes headed to El Salvador under the powers of the act needed to be stopped at once and that any planes already in the air should turn around. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Reuters
5 days ago
- Politics
- Reuters
Republican-led US Senate confirms Trump's first second-term judicial nominee
WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump secured approval of his first judicial nominee of his second term, as the U.S. Senate confirmed a former law clerk to three members of the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority to a seat on a federal appeals court. The Republican-led Senate voted 46-42 along party lines in favor of Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer serving under Tennessee's attorney general, to be appointed as a life-tenured judge on the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She is the first of 15 judicial nominees the president has announced to date to secure Senate approval, as Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate look to add to the 234 judicial appointments Trump made in his first term. With Hermandorfer's confirmation, Trump tied former President Joe Biden's total of 235 judicial appointments. Such appointments could help Trump further shift the ideological balance of the judiciary to the right at a moment when White House officials have accused judges who have blocked parts of his immigration and cost-cutting agenda they have found to be unlawful of being part of a "judicial coup." Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, ahead of a procedural vote on Hermandorfer's nomination on Thursday, said the goal was to fill around 50 judicial vacancies on the bench with judges who "understand the proper role of a judge." He said judges should "understand that their job is to interpret the law, not usurp the job of the people's elected representatives by legislating from the bench." Hermandorfer clerked for Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett, and clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was a judge on a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Barrett and Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court in Trump's first term, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority. Hermandorfer has been leading a strategic litigation unit in Republican Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office, where she defended the state's near-total abortion ban and challenged a rule adopted under Biden barring discrimination against transgender students. Senate Democrats had argued that Hermandorfer, 38, who is just a decade out of law school, lacked sufficient legal experience to join the bench and had shown a willingness to support extreme legal positions supporting Trump's agenda.
