James Ho Accidentally Makes Powerful Case For Robust Judge-Shopping Reforms

Perhaps the weirdest part about Ho’s remarks is that at several points, he accidentally (?) makes a pretty compelling case that what Kacsmaryk is doing is, broadly speaking, wrong and bad, and that a functioning legal system would have stripped him of his power years ago. For as upset as he purports to be about the Judicial Conference’s attempt to intervene, Ho’s arguments lead to the inexorable conclusion that the rules should, if anything, have more teeth. 

The first part of his speech is dedicated to outlining the importance of single-judge divisions in a state as large as Texas. Under the new rules—which, again, are not “rules,” and which Kacsmaryk’s court already said it would ignore—Ho warns that people who live in the Texas panhandle, instead of appearing before Kacsmaryk, could be forced to “litigate their rights before a federal judge 400 miles away in Dallas,” which would be, hypothetically, an inconvenient and unfair result. “We shouldn’t impose greater burdens or different rules on Americans, just because they live outside our Nation’s largest urban centers,” he said.

This sentiment, on its face, isn’t unreasonable. But it is also just as unreasonable, and far less hypothetical, for those who have already been dragged into Kacsmaryk’s courtroom while he cranks out Conservapedia-grade opinions anointing himself the nation’s leading authority on reproductive health. The right-wing activist group that brought the mifepristone case, the Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine, are not dyed-in-the-wool Amarillo natives; the group incorporated in Texas weeks after the Supreme Court decided Dobbs so that they could get Kacsmaryk as the judge. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is behind the challenge to fair lending rules, could have filed anywhere; it chose Texas, and to Amarillo specifically, to do it. Kacsmaryk is not using his position as Amarillo’s lone federal judge to protect the rights of his friends and neighbors; he is using it to rubber-stamp the worst ideas of anyone willing to show up at his office.