What a surprise

Another skeezy Trumpy judge.

In his 2020 and 2021 annual disclosures, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk wrote that he held between $5 million and $25 million in “common stock” of a company – a significant majority of the judge’s personal wealth. The name of the company he held stock in is redacted.

[...]

In a statement to CNN, Kacsmaryk said the “Administrative Office of the United States Courts approved the redaction after reviewing the relevant rules and applicable threats.”

[...]

The redaction is the latest example of Kacsmaryk not being fully transparent as a judge and judicial nominee, even as he has become one of the most controversial judges in the country.

CNN reported Thursday that Kacsmaryk failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation process two interviews in which he discussed contraception and gay rights. And The Washington Post reported last week that Kacsmaryk removed his name in 2017 from a pending law review article criticizing protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions as he was being nominated.

Kacsmaryk, who worked as a lawyer for a conservative religious freedom advocacy group before joining the bench, was first nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed in 2019. In recent years, he has become a significant legal thorn in the side of the Biden administration, issuing sweeping rulings and nationwide injunctions on issues like immigration and protections for LGBTQ workers, even before his abortion ruling this month.

[...]

“It is a private corporation headquartered and operated outside of Texas, outside the Fifth Circuit. It has never been a party in any case in the Northern District of Texas,” Kacsmaryk wrote of the company he holds stock in. “The Clerk’s Office has the name of the entity, actively screens incoming cases, and I would be automatically recused from any cases involving this entity.

  CNN

Then why can't we know who it is? I might think it was a Trump company, but I don't think there's a Trump company still operating.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There oughta be a law

This is the Texas judge who handed down the mifepristone ruling that would severely curtail its use.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 04/16/2023:

Ramifications of a mifepristone ban

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In the battle for women's health

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary injunction to vacate the FDA's approval of the drug [mifepristone] altogether.

The FDA responded by requesting an emergency stay of the decision, elevating the case for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in.

The appellate panel then issued a complicated ruling on the injunction, siding in part with the FDA and part with the anti-abortion coalition.

[...]

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has placed a hold on a lower court ruling that restricts access to the abortion drug mifepristone until Wednesday night. Alito also instructed that any responses be filed by April 18 at noon.

[...]

Portions of a Texas district court's order that limits the drug would have otherwise taken effect April 15, but Alito's order put it on pause.

[...]

The administration brief calls the lower court rulings "unprecedented" and says they "unleashed regulatory chaos" by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone."

[...]

"The district court countermanded the scientific judgment the FDA has maintained across five administrations; nullified the approval of a drug that has been safely used by millions of Americans over more than two decades; and upset reliance interests in the health care system that depends on the availability of mifepristone as an alternative to surgical abortion for women who choose to lawfully terminate their early pregnancies." The administration said those harms would be felt throughout the nation because mifepristone has lawful uses in every state, regardless of whether abortion is legal, for instance, to treat women who have miscarried.

[...]

Meanwhile, a competing ruling out of Washington state could limit the Texas injunction's reach.

The final ruling from the appellate panel led the DOJ to appeal even higher to the Supreme Court in hopes of ensuring access to the drug is fully restored.

  NPR

What isn't explained in this article is the extreme bullshit of having the original suit brought by some doctors who claimed standing to sue by virtue of the fact that someone might some day come to them for treatment after having had complications from the use of mifepristone. (Additionally, they called the cramping and expulsion of uterine material "side effects" of the drug. That's not side effects, that's effects. That's what the drug is supposed to do. That's how a pregnancy ends.)

And never mind that this situation has never been presented to them, and is unlikely to ever be presented to them due to the drug's safety record (safer than Tylenol), and the probability that if someone did have complications they would go to the doctor who prescribed mifepristone to them in the first place and not to these assholes.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 02:58 pm:  Well, lookie here...

So much slime in the "conservative" world.

"Uterus Inquisition Squad"

Access to medicine shouldn’t be controversial, and it wouldn’t be but for the Christian fundamentalist forces who’ve been emboldened by the right-wing takeover of the Judicial Branch and the Supreme Court’s revocation of reproductive rights. Now, at the very moment mifepristone has become one of the few means of securing widespread abortion access, these people have targeted it for destruction. Back in November, the inaccurately named Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) brought a lawsuit against the FDA challenging its initial approval of mifepristone. The ADF claims that the FDA did not follow its own procedures when it approved the drug.

The lawsuit is so ridiculous that it hardly warrants discussion on the merits. First of all, the statute of limitations allows challenges to FDA procedures for only six years and mifepristone has been approved for over 20. Moreover, Congress passed an amendment to the Food and Drug Act in 2007 that revised the FDA’s procedures and deemed any drug previously approved by the agency to be in compliance with the new rules. There are also jurisdictional problems with the lawsuit. But even if you overlook all these technical legal hurdles, the ADF’s core argument—that the FDA failed to consider the dangers of mifepristone—is wrong. Mifepristone is safe, and no amount of Gregorian chanting from the self-appointed Uterus Inquisition Squad can prove it otherwise.

Unfortunately, we have to treat this incoherent nonsense masquerading as a lawsuit as a serious threat to abortion drugs because of the judge who recently got hold of the case: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed district court judge in Texas.

[...]

He was an anti-gay crusader for a Christian right law firm before Trump raised him up to be a judge. He claims that homosexuality is a “disorder.” He’s attacked the right to contraception and denounced the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s.

[...]

[This case has] not ended up in front of Kacsmaryk by accident or bad luck. Right-wingers have actively sought out Kacsmaryk for their most dubious legal claims by means of the 21st-century version of “forum shopping.”

[...]

In the past, one of the more popular forms of forum-shopping saw lawyers trying to game out whether a state court or federal one would lead to a better outcome. They could do this because many state and federal laws overlap, and many corporations (and the federal government) can be sued in any state they do business in.

[...]

The Supreme Court tried to put a stop to this kind of forum shopping in 1938, in a case called Erie Railroad v. Tompkins. The so-called Erie Doctrine required that in cases where there is a question of whether to apply federal or state law, a federal judge must apply the law as it would be understood in the states where the judge resides.

[...]

You’ll never see a challenge to federal gun regulations filed in California, or a lawsuit against the fossil-fuel industry filed in Texas. Lawyers will always seek to take advantage of the laws most favorable to their clients or positions, wherever those laws happen to exist.

[...]

[L]awyers Steven Vladek and Max Wolson point out that Texas regularly removes cases to federal court to get specific judges, and it works.

[...]

But that’s not what right-wingers are doing now. Instead, they are “judge shopping”—trying to take advantage of the fact that the judges themselves apply the laws differently based on which party appointed them and whether they have even a basic grasp of logic or fairness.

[...]

In the North District of Texas, judges are assigned based on their “divisions,” which break the region down to places like Dallas, Lubbock, and Amarillo. Kacsmaryk is the district judge for Amarillo and, by rule, is assigned every single federal case filed there. If you bring a federal case in Amarillo, you are guaranteed to get Judge Kacsmaryk. As Ian Milihiser put it on Vox, this rule makes Judge Kacsmaryk “one of the most consequential public officials in modern-day America.”

[...]

Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton regularly files suit in the Southern District of Texas, Victoria Division, where the case is guaranteed to end up in front of Judge Drew Tipton, another Trump appointee who is a virulent anti-immigration crusader. Paxton did it again this week to challenge another Biden immigration policy.

[...]

There are no laws, rules, or doctrines to stop this kind of behavior. Arguably, both conservative and liberal lawyers can (and do) engage in judge shopping at some level. What’s supposed to make the process fruitless are the circuit courts of appeal and, ultimately, the Supreme Court.

  The Nation

So much for any liberal lawyer's hopes of judge or forum shopping advantage.

[C]ertain courts of appeal, like that of the Fifth Circuit that presides over Texas, have been captured by right-wing extremists just like the rest of the Republican Party. More problematically, we’ve seen the Supreme Court act quickly to overrule liberal district court judges on emergency appeal but leave in place rulings from conservatives for at least as long as it takes for their cases to make it all the way up to the highest court through normal order. That’s a process that can take years, and sometimes span presidential administrations.

[...]

When you file a lawsuit, the judge should be picked from a pool of all federal judges in a state, and if we’re talking about a federal law, any judge in the country should be in the hopper.

[...]

The circuits exist so that travel wouldn’t be too taxing for the judges, who lived in some central region of the district. But judges no longer need to take two horses and a palanquin hoisted by slaves to get from New Orleans to Amarillo. A Delta flight and an Uber can get anybody anywhere in this country in under 12 hours.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 04/13/2023:  The Texas judge ruled as expected.  Scrambling ensued.

Still ridiculous.

"Parental rights"

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

[...]

The plaintiff in Deanda v. Becerra is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

[...]

Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

[...]

Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

[...]

[L]itigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

[...]

The Constitution [...] does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” [... Plaintiff] does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.

Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. [T]he Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.”

  Vox

Yeah, well, the new MAGA Supreme Court just took a case with the exact same problem of standing and injury, 303 Creative, involving a woman who wants to create a website excluding gays, so I wouldn't put any hopes on that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.