The federal judiciary’s new rules target “judge shopping.” That’s terrible news for Matthew Kacsmaryk and other partisan judges.
Plaintiffs hoping to reshape federal or state policies will no longer be allowed to choose which judge will hear their case, at least in federal court. A new policy announced Tuesday by the Judicial Conference of the United States, a government body that sets policy for federal courts, targets rules in some federal courts that the conference said “risked creating an appearance of ‘judge shopping.’”
At least in the short term, this policy is a massive victory for the Biden administration — and, indeed, for anyone who believes that federal and state policies should not rise and fall based on one outlier judge’s partisan views.
Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, has been very aggressive in bringing lawsuits that challenge Biden administration policies before right-wing judges who have then issued sweeping, nationwide orders blocking those policies — sometimes on highly dubious grounds that are reversed, months later, by the Supreme Court.
2016 was an outlier, not the new normal. What about 2020, when Biden defeated Trump? How many people will switch from Biden to Trump? Compare that with the Hailey voters who tell pollsters their prepared to do the opposite. How many people who turned 18 since 2020 are going to vote for Trump? Compare that to the number of Trump voters who died since 2020.
Trump won in 2016 by motivating people who never voted before to turn out. Compare that to the “excitement” and novelty of his current campaign.
The national and state Republican committees are under Trump control. But they’re also broke. The big Republican pockets don’t want to donate to a party that actively attacks and excludes them as “establishment” just so that their money can pay Trump’s legal bills. There are real questions about how much of a campaign the RNC can run for Trump, much less down-ballot people.
Trump is historically weak. Optimism is rational.