Politics & Power Quote by Michael K. Simpson

Splitting a federal appeals court is supposed to sound like filing paperwork: tidy, technical, boring. Simpson’s line leans hard on that register, then quietly admits the real engine underneath it. “Administrative purposes” is the respectable wrapper; “liberal decisions of the Ninth Circuit” is the product inside. The quote works because it performs a familiar Washington trick: say the wonky justification first, then smuggle in the partisan motive as if it were merely background noise.

Simpson is talking about the long-running conservative campaign to break up the Ninth Circuit, the sprawling appellate court that covers much of the American West and has been a frequent villain in GOP messaging for decades. By invoking “much debate” and the vague “and so forth,” he treats that controversy as common knowledge, a kind of civic weather. That casualness is strategic. It normalizes the idea that a court’s perceived ideology is a legitimate reason to redraw judicial maps, without having to argue the point directly.

The subtext is blunt: if you can’t reliably win under the existing referees, change the league. Court-splitting becomes a way to reallocate power through geography, creating new circuits, new judgeships, and eventually new precedents. Simpson’s phrasing also spreads responsibility. “People have wanted” makes it sound like a grassroots preference rather than an organized, long-term legal strategy.

What’s most revealing is the tension he doesn’t resolve. He gestures at neutrality while acknowledging the true incentive: not efficiency, but outcome. The sentence is a small portrait of how institutional reform gets sold in American politics: as management, not as combat.