In an effort to stop advocacy groups from engaging in the type of "judge-shopping" that recently resulted in a Donald Trump-appointed judge issuing a controversial -- and to most legal scholars -- indefensible ruling on the abortion pill mifepristone, a Democratic lawmaker has proposed a bill that would clamp down on the practice.
According to a report from Vox legal analyst Ian Millhiser, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) is taking the lead in an effort to stop the legal shenanigans of the kind that created chaos until the Supreme Court stepped in and issued a temporary stay of the order.
As Millhiser explained, judge shopping is not new and that, in a report in 2021, Chief Justice John Roberts cited it as a growing problem.
According to the Vox report, "Kacsmaryk, and judges like him, are able to shape federal policy so often because of the unusual way Texas’s federal courts assign cases to trial judges. Every federal civil case filed in Amarillo, Texas, is automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk, so Republican litigants who want to all but guarantee a trial court victory simply need to file their complaint in Kacsmaryk’s Amarillo courthouse. Similarly, virtually any lawsuit filed in Victoria, Texas, is assigned to Drew Tipton, another Trump judge whose record is similar to Kacsmaryk’s."
The report notes that Hirono's "Stop Judge Shopping Act" is a mere two pages and specifically states that any lawsuit "seeking a nationwide order blocking a federal policy, or seeking an order blocking a federal policy that 'extends beyond the parties to the civil action,' be filed in a federal court in the District of Columbia."
Millhiser added, "In fairness, the short-term impact of this bill would be to move these lawsuits into a court that currently favors Democrats. At the moment, most of the seats on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia are held by Democratic appointees. And, while Trump did appoint four judges to this court, none have shown the same consistent disregard for the rule of law displayed by Kacsmaryk."
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