The Justice Department is tripling down on its allegations that Texas is “judge-shopping” in the lawsuits the state has brought against the Biden administration.
But the department is running into headwinds as it tries to push back against the Lone Star State’s pattern of filing cases in a way that allows it to effectively choose the judges that hear them.
At a hearing last week on a Justice Department request that one such case be transferred to another federal court, the judge seemed to dismiss DOJ’s concerns and appeared to blame the department for creating any perception that the case assignment set up was unfair.
The judge, US District Judge Drew Tipton, is one of three judges presiding over cases where DOJ has called out Texas for funneling its litigation against the Biden administration to courthouses – often in remote parts of the state – where a single, pre-determined judge is assigned most or all of the cases.
With its tactics, Texas can “circumvent the random assignment system by never filing in Divisions where they have a non-trivial chance of not knowing what judge they are likely to be assigned,” the DOJ said in brief submitted to Tipton this week.
Private litigants have been accused of taking advantage of the system as well – with perhaps the most high-profile example being a lawsuit by anti-abortion activists seeking to block the FDA’s approval of a drug used in medication abortions, the most common method of terminating a pregnancy. The case is before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has issued controversial rulings against the Biden administration in the past and who is all but guaranteed to hear cases filed in the Amarillo division, where the medication abortion lawsuit was brought.
The DOJ asked Kacsmaryk last month to transfer a separate, Texas-brought lawsuit against the administration…
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