Of Course They Did

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas has announced that it will ignore Judicial Conference’s anti-judge shopping policy, because ……… The Aristocrats, I guess?

Really, this is because that the right wing hack judges want right wing hack litigants to be able to pick them so that they can issue insane right wing hack opinions:

Apparently, everything really is bigger in Texas, including the audacity of federal judges who think they’re above the rules. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the Northern District of Texas has decided that new judicial shopping rules just don’t apply to them. Because that would make it harder to win culture war fights. But if you want to undermine what little respect is left for the judiciary, this is exactly how to do it. This is brazen partisanship, mixed with a belief that the rules just don’t apply when you don’t like them.

Just recently we wrote about the new policy that came down from the Judicial Conference, which is run by Chief Justice John Roberts. The policy states that when cases are filed in a courthouse, they should be randomly assigned to any judge in the district, rather than keeping the cases in that specific division courthouse.

The issue here first really came up in some patent cases. Some federal courthouses really only have one or sometimes two judges. So, plaintiffs were able to effectively guarantee cases would get before those judges. Soon after this became known in patent cases, a bunch of MAGA Trumpists realized they could use this to their advantage and focused on filing cases that brought up key culture war nonsense in the courts of Terry Doughty or Matthew Kacsmaryk, who would then issue batsh%$ crazy rulings, often with broad injunctions.

All of this really harmed whatever respect was left for the judiciary, and John Roberts knew it. He had mentioned the problem two years ago and seemed to recognize the harm it did to respect for the judiciary. But it still took two more years for the Judicial Conference (which is Roberts and the Chief Judges of all the Appellate courts) to put out this policy note.

And almost immediately, Republicans freaked out. Two of the worst 5th Circuit Judges, James Ho and Edith Jones, whined about how unfair this was. A bunch of Republican senators sent an angry letter to courts telling them to ignore the new policy. Hilariously, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis were the senators who sent the letter. Tillis’ name stands out because in 2021 he was the senator who sent a letter to Roberts complaining about this practice and asking Roberts to fix it.

………

Anyway, given all that, the Judicial Conference walked back its original policy decision and made it clear that the new policy was at each court’s “discretion.”

You know where this is heading next, don’t you?

The Northern District of Texas, where Matthew Kacsmaryk is one of 11 judges, but the only judge in the Amarillo division, has announced that it will not change how it distributes cases.

 (%$ mine)

………

So anyone wanting a pretty much automatic GOP-culture war win just needs to file cases in Amarillo, and you’ve got your man.

It really is remarkable just how contemptuous conservative judges are of the very concept of the rule of law.