Republicans can choose the judge who hears their lawsuits. DOJ wants to stop that

[douglas9]

Last week, the Justice Department decided to confront one of the most pernicious and exploited glitches in America’s courts.

There are a handful of federal trial judges in Texas — Matthew Kacsmaryk, Drew Tipton, and Reed O’Connor are probably the best known among them — who have largely behaved as rubber stamps for whatever far-right cause shows up in their courtrooms. If you want a court order attempting to repeal Obamacare, or locking in Trump-era immigration policies, or attacking the right to birth control, these guys are happy to deliver.

Ordinarily, the fact that a few trial judges hold extreme views would be unfortunate, but hardly a crisis. According to the Federal Judicial Center, there are 71 federal trial judges in the state of Texas, and federal lawsuits are supposed to be randomly assigned to a local federal judge shortly after they are filed. So, if Texas’s federal courts were functioning properly, judges like Kacsmaryk or Tipton would only occasionally be assigned cases brought by litigants with a political agenda.

But the case assignments process in Texas is not functioning properly. Texas federal courts assign 100 percent of all cases filed in Amarillo to Kacsmaryk. They assign virtually all cases filed in Victoria to Tipton. That means that right-wing litigants can guarantee their lawsuit will be heard by an allied judge simply by filing their suit in one of these two cities.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/2/14/23597741/supreme-court-matthew-kascmaryk-judge-shopping-texas-utah-walsh-justice-department