In a very short span of time, “judge shopping” went from a wonky, academic concern to one on the lips of many in the Democratic caucus.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1463214
In a very short span of time, “judge shopping” went from a wonky, academic concern to one on the lips of many in the Democratic caucus.
We are starting to see the true meaning of the term “Judge Shopping” these days. I wonder if Judge Kacsmaryk likes salmon fishing?
Forum shopping has been going on for a long time. The difference is the Republican party has politically weaponized a process that has been employed by savvy lawyers since Hector was a pup.
Just keep in mind that nobody in the Federalist Society is smart enough to come up with an original idea. I would look to Mitch McConnel and his efforts to appoint inexperienced and stupid judges because they are easily manipulated, and John Roberts and the way he has allowed circuits and districts to evolve. As well as the entire Supreme Court for allowing District Judges the authority to announce immediate nationwide orders unsupervised.
The last item might suggest a solution but very occasionally a district judge does have to deal with a national emergency quickly.
I prefer Hirono’s approach. There are tons of districts and a bunch of circuit courts that are overwhelmingly FedSoc. Wyden’s approach just pushes cases into those districts instead of single-judge divisions. It makes the math a little less disfavorable, but not much else. D.C. doesn’t have any senators with blue slips, so the nominees all get hearings and a good amount of scrutiny. And I would add one thing: Make all the cases seeking injunctive relief beyond the immediate parties be decided by a three-judge panel, lest any one judge be Trevor McFadden.
While these bills and other legislative fixes will likely languish until Democrats again
Now I understand why Kate called this a “spitball” approach.
We Dems have been getting used like chumps now for decades.
The nation is paying dearly for it.
Same thing with the media Josh characterized. Polemics and hyperbole over what the other side is doing as a way of justifying their own extremism and jettisoning any moral boundaries over an issue.
That, and they’re just fucking nuts.
How did we get nationwide injunctions from a single federal court? I ask because I recall cases where a court ruling, particularly from the 9th Circuit, applied only to the appellate district.
Also, the DC circuit is awash in experience with cases involving federal law and regulatory agencies which can be complex, have widespread implications and involve narrow technical expertise. All the things the likes of Cannon and Kaszmaryk are completely unqualified (and ideologically disinclined) to judge fairly. Rendering the first level of litigation performative and useless.
If I recall, there can be ‘good’ reasons for a nationwide injunction, although I can’t come up with an example. Something that would be very damaging to a lot of people, and should be more carefully evaluated, basically. Eliminating DACA, for instance.
Excellent summary, Kate!
The Fair Courts Act sounds like a good idea. Absolute power corrupts.
right-wing litigants plant their cases in court divisions where they’re guaranteed to get their similarly right-wing judge of choice
Classic Democratic behavior… use spitballs while the GOP uses AR-15s.
One of the weirder themes of the Trump administration was that the global economy was decoupling, as in e.g. decoupling of trade with China. This was based on the idea that global trade had peaked, that we would all become “makers” and move back to our respective corners. But is there deglobalization or “slowballing” as suggested? Where’s the evidence, as trade happens between companies or groups of companies, not nations? Indeed, “de-everything” was the theme at Davos this year.
The deglobalization lens is not only political, it bends policy.
And then phase three starts, in our view, with the invasion of Ukraine. And in our view that was a game changer in the sense that it exposed the fragility of global value chains to geopolitical risk. Geopolitics have always had always been important, especially in the context in relation to China, as I mentioned earlier. We had been concerned about the rise of China as an economic power even before. But what happened with the invasion of Ukraine, all of a sudden Europe found itself in a very difficult position because it had relied on energy imports from Russia to a large extent to fund its growth.
And so, it’s not that Russia per se is very important, but by analogy, many policymakers, especially the U.S., started thinking, What would happen if something similar, if a similar shock hit us, but the country, the relevant country, were not Russia, it were China, which is one of our biggest trading partners. So, that created a whole new thinking regarding trade, regarding resilience to geopolitical risk, and provided new arguments for diversifying, at least diversifying away from countries that may perceived as not being our friends.
Slowballing or the decline of global trade, whether or not it is real, could emerge as an issue. Simple forms of the argument arose in 2015 with Brexit and the trade war with China and more recently with covid and global supply chains, Biden should have this, it’s his wheelhouse, but what GOP presidential candidate has much of a grasp of this complex topic. Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy, maybe Glenn Youngkin, who has yet to declare. It wasn’t that long ago that Peter Navarro headed the now defunct Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. If Trump runs, will he be resurrecting his talking points on trade from 2016? Like I say, weird.
Israeli PM Netanyahu was just admitted to a hospital for “evaluation”. No other detail at the moment
spitball
That’s my Dems …lol
Good old fashioned, spit in your hand and shake on it, deal done, manly male bonding spit.
And, in baseball, it’s a sneaky, illegal pitch : - )
Dunno. I kinda follow this conceptually. Would any of this make a dime’s difference to the avg voter?
Let’s not forget buying their property.
It seems to be a big fav.
All wars are trade wars. If we are at the tail-end of Pax Americana, deglobalizing could be rough for international relations and increase wealth disparity domestically. Russia is currently experiencing sanctions which has led to car part shortages that have made life miserable. No alternator is safe.
But the greatest risk may be to peace. Cold wars have often led to hot wars. During the interwar period in the 1930s there was a dramatic shift away from multilateral trade toward trade within empires or informal spheres of influence. Historians have argued that this shift exacerbated tensions between countries ahead of World War II. We can only hope that the coming years will not be a replay of this pre-belligerence era.
“Spit ball”
Such an attractive term…
Car part shortages? aww gee. that’s too bad. Mebbe if they stopped their war in Ukraine… but no… Putin has no way out of the shit storm he created in February of 2022. One of the stupidest moves by a world leader in at minimum the last 50-60 years. Including Vietnam and other wars we’ve been involved in. And it’s not just Ukraine and Russia… The war has damaged trade in basic food stuffs. Grain …Ukraine used to grow 10-15% of the world’s wheat. That is significant. And a large part is in warehouses in Odessa and unable to get past the Black Sea to where it’s needed so people not involved in this stupid war don’t starve. The Russians have that grain as hostage. Fuckers. I hate them. And that hatred is not recent either.
Imagine some of the very best grain growing ground in the world littered with mines and unexploded shells. It will be decades to make it right.
The hatred from Ukraine toward Russia will last for generations.
Oh, those Dems, they’ll just never learn to be ruthless sons of bitches. It’s time for all of us to leave the party and find one more vicious, we can call it the Pit Bull Party.
Since Republicans can only understand a problem when it happens to them, one single instance of judge-shopping by Democrats in a high profile case would assure some converts to “fairness”. The fact that one single judge’s rule can affect the entire country is absurd on its face.
The push for ethics codes needs to include the ethics of appointing unqualified, inexperienced judges simply because they are hard right, very young and in good health, the ethics of SCOTUS nominees refusing to answer "hypothetical " questions yet they are more than willing to rule on hypothetical cases (see recent Colorado web designer decision), the ethics of allowing SCOTUS nominees to perjure themselves with impunity during hearings, the ethics of allowing The Federalist Society with a heavy religious agenda to choose judges. The entire system is unjust, dishonest and unethical. Perhaps it was not always this way but McConnell, et al have exploited every weakness and loophole to form a judicial wall between corruption and fairness. We know which side of the wall the current SCOTUS majority is on.