The federal judge overseeing a high-profile challenge to the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of certain drugs used to terminate a pregnancy is a deeply conservative jurist with a proclivity for siding with plaintiffs looking to roll back reproductive and LGBTQ rights or block key Biden administration policies.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was confirmed by a 52-46 Senate vote in 2019.
The FDA case, the biggest abortion-related case since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, has drawn considerable criticism from abortion rights advocates. But Kacsmaryk himself has also drawn scrutiny for the way he’s handled the matter, with critics taking issue with some highly unusual steps he took to delay making the public aware that a hearing was scheduled in the case for Wednesday.s
Since Kacsmaryk took the bench in 2019, he’s helped make Texas a legal graveyard for policies of President Joe Biden’s administration, largely due to the fact that Texas’ rules for how federal cases are assigned in the state have allowed conservatives to file there strategically, almost guaranteeing their complaints will be before sympathetic judges. Kacsmaryk is assigned every case filed in his division.
In recent comments to The Washington Post, Kacsmaryk’s sister, Jennifer Griffith, detailed her brother’s long history of being anti-abortion and how she believes fate brought the abortion case before him.
“I feel like he was made for this,” Griffith said. “He is exactly where he needs to be.”
The group that brought the medication abortion lawsuit, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, incorporated in Amarillo a few months before they filed the suit, according to documents from the Texas secretary of state’s office.
Kacsmaryk is the only federal district judge seated…
Read the full article here