If you’ve followed the fight over where and whether abortion should remain legal in the United States, you’ve probably heard the name “Matthew Kacsmaryk.”
Kacsmaryk is a former lawyer for a religious right law firm, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to a federal court in Texas. He is widely expected to issue a decision ordering the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of mifepristone, a medication used in more than half of all abortions within the United States.
The Trump judge held a hearing on Wednesday to hear arguments in a case seeking to remove the widely used drug from the US marketplace, and a Washington Post reporter at the hearing says that he “appeared to seriously entertain claims that mifepristone is unsafe.” That won’t surprise anyone familiar with this judge’s record of partisan rulings.
Make no mistake, there is no legal basis whatsoever for a federal judge to endorse a lawsuit trying to ban this medication, which has been lawful in the United States since 2000.
But if Kacsmaryk rules as he is expected to rule in this lawsuit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, that will immediately test whether the rule of law still exists in a judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.
Here’s what happens next in the federal court system: There will likely be two parallel appeals processes — a relatively quick process seeking to temporarily block Kacsmaryk’s order, and then a much more drawn-out process seeking to permanently reverse his decision.
If the federal courts could be trusted to apply the law in a fair and non-partisan manner, even when hot-button issues like abortion are at stake, then we could expect a higher court to step in almost immediately to quash a decision seeking to ban mifepristone. As attorney Adam Unikowsky, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, writes in a scathing prebuttal of Kacsmaryk’s expected decision, “if the subject matter of this case were…
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