U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum has been a federal judge in Minnesota since he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Because of this fact, the heavy-duty attack from the House Judiciary Committee --now controlled by the Republicans -- was highly unusual. Committee members accused the judge of going easy in the sentencing of several drug defendants and threatened to subpoena the records relating to Rosenbaum's sentencing decisions. They also requested a broader review of drug sentencing by the entire federal bench in Minnesota. Reporter Tresa Baldas and Barry Feld, a University of Minnesota law professor, investigated the dispute and found some who saw the committee investigation as an improper violation of the separation of powers. Curiously, when the reporter and law professor used TRACFED's new tool for examining the records of individual federal judges they found that Judge Rosenbaum's drug sentences were similar to other federal judges in the state and that the median sentence of all judges in that district were longer than the national median.
