We’re gonna have to make them stop.
The chief judge of the northern district of Texas, home to infamous Trump judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, has informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that the district will not change its case assigning practices, in repudiation of a new anti-judge shopping policy.
“The district judges of the Northern District of Texas met on March 27, 2024, and discussed case assignment,” Chief Judge David Godbey wrote to Schumer in a letter dated March 29. “The consensus was not to make any change to our case assignment process at this time.”
It’s a brazen rejection of a recent policy change at the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body for the federal courts. Last month, the Conference announced that all cases seeking nationwide relief against a federal or state government action should go through a randomization process — necessary to stop right-wing litigants from planting anti-Biden administration cases with judges like Kacsmaryk, who gets virtually all of the cases filed in his division. His habitual granting of nationwide injunctions means that his rulings are not only nearly always a win for those litigants, but that they also block federal government action for the entire country.
Schumer wrote to the northern Texas chief soon after the Judicial Conference announced its policy change, posing a list of questions, including when the district would adopt the new policy.
In a Monday statement, the Senate majority leader called it “unfortunate” that Godbey wouldn’t end the “odious practice.”
“The Senate will consider legislative options that put an end to this misguided practice,” he added, though such efforts have lost steam before, and would almost certainly die in the Republican House.
See here for the background. There was concern at the time that there could be issues with enforcing this new process, and you can see why with this response. The question now is what can be done about it. The obvious-to-me answer is to codify this (and some other reforms about national injunctions and other matters) into the law, and include a provision that says any judge who violates these procedures is subject to sanctions up to and including removal from the bench. This can’t be left up to the impeachment process because there’s no way on God’s green earth that there will ever be a two-thirds majority to impeach a federal judge for acting like a blatant partisan. Also, too, appoint more judges that do respect the law and the fact that we live in a society. Needless to say, both of those remedies will require another Democratic triumvirate, one that does not rest on the likes of Manchin and Sinema. That ain’t gonna be easy, but it’s what we need to do. KERA has more.