How Trump shook up the balance of an appeals court once reviled by the right Ben Feuer FacebookTwitterEmail President Trump shook up the balance of an appeals court once reviled by conservatives.Getty Images In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter, with a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, doubled the size of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and appointed some of the most liberal judges in American history. By 1980, Carter’s 15 appointments meant nearly 70% of the court’s judges were Democrats. Some would later become household names, both celebrated and reviled: Stephen Reinhardt, Harry Pregerson, Betty Fletcher, and others made mainstream news for overturning controversial laws banning same-sex marriage and assisted suicide, battling enforcement of the death penalty, and protecting the environment from rampant destruction. Conservatives would come to sneer at the “Ninth Circus” and snicker at the “Nutty Ninth,” which regularly found itself atop Supreme Court reversal tallies. Republicans in Congress spent decades futilely demanding the massive circuit — encompassing 11 western states and territories covering 60 million people — be broken up.