Judge shopping channel

Created
Thu, 09/03/2023 - 06:00
Updated
Thu, 09/03/2023 - 06:00
The best justice money — and corrupt ideology — can buy: You would think, based on the flurry of litigation unfolding there, that a lot of drama is going down in Amarillo, Texas.  Of the couple dozen lawsuits Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has filed against the Biden administration, over a third have been funneled through the relatively small city, despite its distance from the state capital.  But it’s got one thing going for it: Trump appointee Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has already amenably batted down Biden administration policies on immigration, access to contraception and LBGTQ protections. Helpfully for Paxton and other right-wing litigants, Kacsmaryk gets 100 percent of the criminal and civil cases filed in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas.  Kacsmaryk has come under nationwide scrutiny while he mulls a case shopped to him to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a drug prescribed to induce abortion.  And Texas works out particularly well for judge shoppers — they can get a case into Kacsmaryk’s hands in Amarillo, or maybe into Reed O’Connor’s in Wichita Falls or Drew Tipton’s in Victoria — resting easy in the knowledge that the state is controlled by the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That leaves as liberals’ greatest hope for intervention…the Supreme Court.  This judge-shopping is a new flavor of an older, and bipartisan, practice. Opponents of Trump administration policies often sued in states governed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then very liberal. Blue…