Schumer Urges Texas District Targeted For Right-Wing Lawsuits To Adopt New Rules Against Judge-Shopping

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) urged a key federal judge in Texas to quickly adopt new limits on plaintiffs’ ability to choose the judge who will oversee their case, also known as judge-shopping, in a letter on Thursday.

“I write to you today encouraging the District Court for the Northern District of Texas to implement the Judicial Conference’s new policy regarding judge shopping as soon as possible,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Chief Judge David Godbey on Thursday.

The Northern District of Texas has been at the epicenter of the controversial practice. Conservatives have been sending lawsuits aiming to block President Joe Biden’s policies to single-judge courthouses in the district — often a specific one in Amarillo, Texas — with the intent of getting their cases before judges known to be conservative activists.

The lone judge in Amarillo, for example, is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointee who previously worked as an activist for the religious right. In recent months and years, Kacsmaryk has issued nationwide injunctions blocking Biden administration immigration policies as well as, notably, the distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone through the mail.

The Judicial Conference of the United States, a federal judicial rule-making body, issued new rules to put a stop to this practice on March 12. Those rules urge federal district courts to use random selection for judges on cases where a plaintiff seeks a statewide or nationwide injunction on a federal policy, rather than automatically sending them to a specific judge. However, district courts retain “discretion” on how to adopt the new rules, the conference clarified after issuing them.

Schumer’s statement follows criticism of the rules from