Montana Senator Urges Break-Up of Ninth Circuit Court

Montana Senator Steve Daines and Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan made their pitch to the U.S. Senate Monday night, urging the senate to split the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals into two separate courts. Daines said that right now, people who live under the ninth circuit court of appeals do not receive equal treatment under the law.

"The Ninth Circuit Court is broken," Daines said. "It is overburdened, and it is unable to provide quality service and expeditious justice to the Americans it is supposed to serve."

Under Daines’ proposal, the Circuit Court of Appeals Restructuring and Modernization Act, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington would leave the ninth circuit and join a new, Twelfth Circuit Court. California, Guam, Hawaii, and the Northern Mariana Islands would remain in the ninth circuit court and that court would still serve more per-capita than any of its peers. Right now, the Ninth Circuit serves, 64.4 million people, by far the largest of the circuit courts, a tally that is 84 percent larger than the next largest court.

While Montana and Alaskan Senators protest the current court structure in the legislature, the state of Arizona is going to court over court structure and has asked to divorce itself form the ninth circuit.

Today’s court structure is a vestige of a sparsely populated west from the past, in 1891 when congress created the ninth circuit, only four percent of the U.S. population lived under the court’s jurisdiction, now, it is over twenty percent.