What initially looked like an outright victory for anti-abortion activists Friday evening soon became more complicated.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, first ruled Friday that the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone – one of the drugs used to terminate a pregnancy – needed to be halted.
But less than an hour after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, US District Judge Thomas Owen Rice of the Eastern District of Washington, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ordered the federal government to keep the drug available in 17 states plus the District of Columbia.
Because the decisions out of the two courts are so contradictory, intervention from the US Supreme Court is a real possibility.
In the meantime, here’s what you need to know about Rice.
Rice was appointed to the Eastern District of Washington in 2011 by Obama. He was confirmed to the position by the US Senate in a 93-4 vote in 2012.
He had served as an assistant US attorney in Washington state starting in 1987. In that role, he focused on issues related to eminent domain and Social Security claims. Prior to that, Rice was a trial attorney in the tax division of the US Department of Justice, where he specialized in abusive tax shelter litigation.
Rice previously sided with an abortion rights group. In 2018, he issued a permanent injunction that blocked the Trump administration from stopping grants to a Planned Parenthood program that funded teen pregnancy prevention programs around the country.
That case was brought against the Trump administration by Planned Parenthood after the administration ended Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants earlier than they were supposed to end for 81 organizations across the US, claiming they had been unsuccessful.
“The Court…
Read the full article here