The United States has a Matthew Kacsmaryk problem.
A longtime activist for the Christian right, Kacsmaryk is the Trump-appointed judge who tried earlier this month to ban mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all abortions in the US, before his decision was blocked by the Supreme Court. Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone decision followed an array of others, on issues ranging from birth control to LGBTQ discrimination to immigration, where he sought to impose his will on the entire nation.
And really, the problem is even larger. Since the start of the Biden administration, right-wing litigants started funneling their lawsuits seeking nationwide rulings to judges they believe will reliably do the bidding of the most extreme elements of the Republican Party, regardless of what the law actually says.
On Wednesday, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced legislation that seeks to prevent litigants from doing just that. It’s not a perfect bill, and it likely would need to be strengthened before it could stop all far-right litigants from funneling their cases to partisans like Kacsmaryk. It’s also utterly unlikely to be enacted by this Congress. But this bill is a hopeful sign that Democrats may get serious about stopping the worst judges in the country from setting federal policy.
“Judge shopping” isn’t exactly new — Chief Justice John Roberts warned in his 2021 report on the federal judiciary about judge shopping by patent lawyers, many of whom tried to shunt their cases to a particular judge in Waco, Texas — but it is an especially serious problem when litigants use it to bypass the entire political process to change federal policy on a nationwide basis.
Kacsmaryk, and judges like him, are able to shape federal policy so often because of the unusual way Texas’s federal courts assign cases to trial judges. Every federal civil case filed in Amarillo, Texas, is automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk, so Republican litigants who want to all but guarantee a…
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