Bill Clinton's appointees do dominate the court and steer its leftist agenda. He named 14 of the 9th Circuit's 24 "active" judges, court documents reveal. However, none of the three judges involved in this decision are Clintonites.
Richard Nixon appointed Goodwin, and Jimmy Carter appointed concurring Justice Stephen Reinhardt. G.H.W. Bush appointed the dissenting judge, Ferdinand F. Fernandez.
In the nation's first ruling of its kind, the appeals court said that when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1954 legislation, he wrote that "millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty."
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that pupils may not be compelled to say the pledge. But the appeals panel claimed that any classroom pledges, even if students refuse to participate, are unconstitutional, an "unacceptable choice between participating and protesting."
"Although students cannot be forced to participate in recitation of the pledge, the school district is nonetheless conveying a message of state endorsement of a religious belief when it requires public school teachers to recite, and lead the recitation of, the current form of the pledge," the two San Francisco judges fretted.
In a partial dissent, Justice Fernandez said Goodwin and Reinhardt went too far in trying "to drive all tincture of religion out of the public life of our polity."
I hope she's right. It'll be the first time.