Reigning in rogue MAGA judges?

The WaPo reports: 

Judges, GOP lawmakers slam new policy that limits ‘judge shopping’

Federal judiciary officials announced Tuesday that cases with broad ramifications should be assigned randomly

Conservative judges and senior Republican lawmakers are pushing back against a newly announced policy that would require assigning judges at random in civil cases that have statewide or national implications, saying the action conflicts with federal law.

In letters sent to about a dozen chief judges across the country, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — joined by Republican Sens. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) — urged the judges to continue their current case assignment practices, noting: “Judicial Conference policy is not legislation.”

They were responding to an announcement Tuesday by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts. Judicial Conference officials have not yet released their new policy to the public, and a spokesman declined to comment when asked whether the conference has the authority to make the change.

On Tuesday, the conference said cases with statewide or national implications can no longer be automatically filed in single-judge divisions and assigned to the judges who preside there. Such divisions exist in rural parts of the country where courthouses are spaced very far apart.  

Officials said they were trying to address widespread concerns about “judge shopping” — or filing a lawsuit in a courthouse where the lone judge is known or suspected to be sympathetic to a particular cause.

This just adds to the mountain of evidence of the bitter authoritarian intent, moral rot and bad faith that controls and drives the Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party (formerly the GOP). Any pro-rule of law person would want lawsuits assigned and judged in a way that is fair. 

Authoritarians want their lawsuits assigned in ways that advance anti-democratic authoritarianism and corruption. The best way to do that is to do judge shopping and file cases where the judge is an unprincipled authoritarian.

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Slate writes about the same proposed anti-judge shopping rule:

John Roberts Just Dropped the Hammer on Rogue, 

Lawless Trump Judges

For more than a decade, conservative plaintiffs have been gaming the judiciary by filing lawsuits before a hard-right judge who’s guaranteed to rule in their favor. Worse, a handful of Republican-appointed judges have made a habit of issuing sweeping decisions that apply nationwide—hobbling the federal government, short-circuiting the democratic process, and transferring inconceivable amounts of power into the hands of a few unelected jurists. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which makes policy for the federal courts, finally struck a blow against this cynical gamesmanship on Tuesday, announcing a new rule to restore the random assignment of cases and close the loophole that lets plaintiffs hand-pick their judges.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s always hard for me to think that anything the Judicial Conference does is a big piece of news, but they did announce a new policy that sets out to curb judge-shopping. It’s the Conference trying to say: “Hey, you can’t just go to the casino that is Amarillo, Texas, and get Matthew Kacsmaryk every time you file a case.”

Mark Joseph Stern: We can glean that under this rule, when somebody files a lawsuit in federal district court that challenges some kind of federal policy—specifically, if it seeks a nationwide injunction or other sweeping relief—it must be randomly assigned to any judge in that district. The lawsuit cannot simply be glued onto the one judge who happens to sit in the division of the district where the plaintiffs strategically filed to prevail in their case.

As you suggested, this is the Matthew Kacsmaryk fix. Kacsmaryk is the guy who sits in a one-judge division in Amarillo, Texas, who will do whatever anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant plaintiffs ask him to do. The state of Texas goes back into his courthouse over and over again to get sweeping injunctions. The same thing happens with a handful of other Trump-appointed judges in Texas and Louisiana.

Chief Justice John Roberts brought up this problem in one of his annual reports, and now he has dropped the hammer. He’s the head of the Judicial Conference, and one of the other most prominent members is Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Sutton is a very Roberts-ian figure who has complained bitterly, and I think correctly, about the scourge of nationwide injunctions. And now they’ve sort of shivved this entire scheme. Their message to these out-of-control district judges seems to be: “It’s over. You can’t keep the grift up. We’re patching this workaround.”

Judge Sutton, talking about this new rule, said: “I actually think the story is about national injunctions. That’s been a new development, really in the last 10 years and maybe the last two or three administrations, where that has become a thing.” I always love when a judge runs out of words and just says “a thing.” But I think it’s important to understand that this policy doesn’t actually stop a single-judge division from issuing a nationwide injunction. It just makes it harder. It sends cases through the spinner to avoid a case going directly to someone like Kacsmaryk. But cases will still end up being randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk.

Yes. It’s alarming that if a case is randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk, he can still work his mischief. He clearly has no hesitation to do whatever his client-plaintiffs want him to do in their ongoing collusion. So the ultimate solution has to be an end to this trend of single judges purporting to seize control of the law and make it whatever they want because they got 51 votes in the Senate and they have a God complex and they’ve decided that they’re the King of America.

Even Republican politicians are getting in on the bashing of the poor Judicial Conference.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell himself, from the floor of the Senate, delivered a screed against this policy, calling it an “unforced error” and also encouraging district courts to defy the Judicial Conference’s authority and ignore the new policy. McConnell actually sent a letter to the chief judge of every district court in the country, co-signed by GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, encouraging them to disregard the policy, basically saying it’s illegal. So we’re seeing Republicans telling courts to defy the chief justice of the United States and his ultimate authority as head of the entire Article III judiciary. We might see an intra-war branch within Article III between judges who accept the policy and judges who don’t.

The proposed new rule,

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