We know for a fact that the American Bar Association concluded that 80% of the 9th Circuit’s decisions that are reviewed by the Supreme Court get overturned.

The relatively common argument stemming back to 1943 is that there is an inherent liberal bias in the way the justices on the circuit have ruled in controversial cases. However, leftwing analysts will typically point out that this accusation is quite outdated. As the New York Times asserted in 2010, “While several of its 27 current judges do lean to the left, the bench contains many conservatives as well, including seven appointed by President George W. Bush.”

We’ve seemed to come to a position where we believe the “buck” stops with the political affiliation of the president that appoints these justices. However, the danger of “activist, liberal” interpretations is not limited to such poor litmus tests such as this. We must take into account that no matter how the 80% statistic is qualified, the cases themselves and the legal decisions disseminating as a result, indicates where the controversy lies in the 9th Circuit’s jurisprudence.

The biggest example of this controversy could be taken as recently as the 9th Circuit’s decision by a 3-judge panel to uphold a restraining order by the Seattle District Court over President Trump’s ban on travel from specific countries that had been cited as harboring grave threats of terrorist activity.

According to the National Review, “...the court cracked open Pandora’s Box — noting that it will likely consider Trump’s campaign statements in determining whether the executive order violated the Establishment Clause. While it didn’t rest its order on Trump’s repeated claims that he intended to implement a Muslim ban, it did say this: The States’ claims raise serious allegations and present significant constitutional questions. In light of the sensitive interests involved, the pace of the current emergency proceedings, and our conclusion that the Government has not met its burden of showing likelihood of success on appeal on its arguments with respect to the due process claim, we reserve consideration of these claims until the merits of this appeal have been fully briefed. Here’s the translation — the court didn’t rule that Trump’s campaign statements rendered the order invalid, but it clearly forecast that it might. Never mind that the order plainly isn’t a Muslim ban, and never mind that the campaign statements weren’t made about the order in question.”

Anyone who understands US Court systems knows that they must never operate from the premise of hypotheticals and statements made outside and are irrelevant to the issue at hand, in this case, an executive order made by the president .

Such wanton activism blatantly violates statute 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f)

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

Such actions have even been exercised by President Obama himself when he barred immigration from Iraq in 2011 due to high risks of terrorist activity. President Trump’s executive power on the matter, should also be held in the same regard.

If the Court’s ultimate duty is to uphold and interpret the law as it stands, it is inexcusable that such law is ignored because of disagreements on policy. The Constitution, as any legal scholar worth his salt would concur, does not extend rights to the world, but only to citizens and legal immigrants subject to its jurisdiction within the United States. It is dangerous to assert that the Constitution is a universal document, which such actions that have been recently undertaken by the 9th Circuit Court seem to suggest.

This decision was so controversial that 5 judges that sit on the 9th Circuit even noted in their dissenting opinion that the decision was confoundingly outside of the boundaries of statutory interpretation:

According to Attorney Robert Barnes at LawNews, “The language of the opinion was almost Scalian: the five Ninth Circuit judges noted their “obligation to correct” the “manifest” errors so bad that the “fundamental” errors “confound Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent.” The district court questioned any judge issuing a “nationwide TRO” “without making findings of fact or conclusions of law” on the merits of the matter and conducting published opinions on seminal matters of national security based on “oral argument by phone involving four time zones.”

It is trends like this that separate the 9th Circuit from its counterparts when analysts try to draw “normalcy” for its unique rate of overturned decisions by the Supreme Court.

Even notable liberal law professors such as Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, concluded:

"If the case reaches the Supreme Court, a major issue will be whether campaign rhetoric delivered by Donald Trump, when he was a private citizen running for president, may be considered by the courts in deciding on the constitutionality of an executive order. The lower courts gave considerable, indeed dispositive, weight to these anti-Muslim statements in deciding that the travel ban was, in reality, a Muslim ban that would violate the constitutional prohibition against discrimination on the basis of religion.

Under that reasoning, had the identical executive order been issued by President Obama, it would have been constitutional. But because it was issued by President Trump, it is unconstitutional. Indeed any executive order issued by President Trump dealing with travel from Muslim countries would be constitutionally suspect because of what candidate Trump said. In my view, that is a bridge too far. It turns constitutional analysis into psychoanalysis, requiring that the motives of the president be probed.

Most political leaders have mixed motives underlying their actions: they want to protect the security of the nation; they want to appeal to their political base; they want to keep campaign promises; they want to win...But the judicial branch will generally defer to the executive branch on matters involving national security, unless there is a clear violation of the Constitution.

In my opinion, that high threshold has not been reached in this case. So I predict the Supreme Court, if it gets the case, will find the new executive order constitutional.”

As a student at the George Washington University that is aspiring to attend law school in the future, I've never seen legal interpretation taken so dramatically out of the context of statutory interpretation and placed purely on hypothetical, irrelevant rhetoric that holds no weight in the executive order being adjudicated.

It is opinions like these that make The Nutty Ninth Circuit unique in its turnover rate, so it is a mistake to completely write off the existence of an inherent problem within its jurisprudence by just inserting qualifiers that change the viewpoint at first glance. If left unchecked, this kind of judicial activism will infect the impartiality and subsequent credibility of the entire court system, as other justices in either the District or Circuit courts will become embolden to rule purely on the basis of policy disagreement rather than actual interpretation of standing law.

Even the Supreme Court itself has expressed concerns about the Ninth Circuit, based on its relatively enormous size and jurisdiction authority.

In 2007, both Justices Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy gave testimony in support of splitting up the 9th Circuit. According to the Washington Examiner, "'For some years ... I've taken the public position that the 9th Circuit is too large and should be split,' Kennedy said. 'I saw firsthand that it is simply too big to have the collegiality that it ought to have.'"

The ruling of the court with regards to President Trump's executive order was extremely dangerous, and I worry that the Circuit's "nuttiness" may have reached an entirely new and perilous plateau in the realm of legal interpretation. Is it time to break this monster in half?