http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-bushs-judges,1,6165526.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines< snip >
On another matter, two of Bush’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit are poised to have significant impact on a pair of cases involving challenges to the U.S. military’s detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Janice Rogers Brown and Thomas B. Griffith, both just placed on the bench last month, were picked at random to sit on a three-judge panel that will hear the cases this fall. Overall, in his four-plus years in office, Bush has pushed a Republican-leaning federal judiciary farther to the right with more than 200 appointments to appellate and district courts.
His district court appointees have been “dramatically conservative but not off the board — not so bizarre that the other judges wouldn’t know them or speak to them,” said Robert A. Carp, a political scientist at the University of Houston who has studied the federal judiciary extensively. Bush’s district appointees stand out as particularly conservative on civil liberties cases such as abortion, freedom of speech and gay rights, Carp found.
On these matters, Bush’s district judgeships were rated 28 percent liberal in Carp’s study. That put them well to the right of jurists appointed by Presidents Nixon, at 38 percent, and Ford, at 40 percent, and slightly to the right of Reagan and the first President Bush, both of whom were rated 32 percent liberal.