Oh, here we go again—another day, another blatant power grab by the left, trying to rewrite the rules when they don’t get their way. During Donald Trump’s first term, left-wing groups were running to friendly courts in liberal bastions like California and Washington state, where judges were practically on speed dial, ready to halt any policy they didn’t like. Thanks to the Senate’s unwritten “blue slip” rule, these groups were all but guaranteed to draw a judge who shared their ideological bent. It was like playing in a rigged casino—surprise, surprise, those judges issued sweeping injunctions that kept Trump’s policies tied up in legal knots for years. And let’s not forget how many of Trump’s policies were left to die on the vine thanks to these judicial shenanigans.
But now that President Biden is in office, it’s Republicans, specifically Texas’s firebrand Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’ve learned to play the same game. Paxton has been incredibly effective at stopping Biden’s policies by securing injunctions from certain Texas-based federal courts. The left’s response? Outrage, of course. They’re livid because they’re not used to losing in the courts. So, naturally, they’re trying to dismantle the very tools Paxton has used to fight back.
This brings us to the left’s latest attempt to pull the rug out from under conservative victories—the push to eliminate single-judge divisions. Right now, federal district courts are divided by state, district, and division. In some of these divisions, there’s only one active judge, like Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in the Amarillo Division of Texas’s Northern District. And boy, has Kacsmaryk got the left riled up. He’s handed down rulings that have put a serious crimp in Biden’s plans, like blocking the FDA’s reckless approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Though the Supreme Court ultimately overturned that ruling, the left’s rage wasn’t tempered. Nope, they’re still out for blood.
Now, in a classic case of sour grapes, left-wing activists are pushing for the Judicial Conference to make it mandatory that cases be randomly assigned throughout a district, regardless of which division receives the filing. The aim is clear: get rid of single-judge divisions so conservative litigants like Paxton can’t file in places where they might get a judge who upholds the law instead of bending it to the left’s political will.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other conservatives have rightly called out this naked power grab for what it is—an attempt to tip the scales of justice in favorof the left. Let’s not forget, the law (28 U.S.C. § 137) explicitly gives district courts the authority to handle their own case assignments. But that hasn’t stopped the left from trying to ram through this change, just weeks before a critical election, no less.
You’ve got Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Biden Justice Department, and a whole army of leftist activists pushing for the Judicial Conference’s Rules Committee to adopt this new rule. They’re arguing it’s all about “fairness,” but let’s be real—this is about making sure conservatives can’t win in court. They’ve trotted out the dusty old Rules Enabling Act to justify this power grab, but Congress—yes, the actual lawmakers—needs to step in and put a stop to it.
If the Judicial Conference gets its way, the Supreme Court should step in and throw the hammer down. The left has already been hammering the Court with political and even physical attacks. Remember when pro-abortion activist Nicholas Roske tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh after the Dobbs opinion leak? Yeah, that’s the level of hysteria we’re dealing with.
And now they’re going after the justices with frivolous ethics complaints—Justice Samuel Alito is being dragged into the mud for, get this, his wife’s personal flag preferences. It’s absurd. The Judicial Conference’s proposal is just another one of these attacks, part of a broader effort to decimate judicial norms simply because the left isn’t getting its way.
Funny thing is, when leftists were winning, they had no problem with how the courts were run. Take Judge William Wayne Justice in Texas—he ran a single-judge division that leftists loved because they knew they could file cases there and get the rulings they wanted. There was no outrage from the media back then. No “advisory guidelines” from the Judicial Conference. Amazing how things change when the shoe’s on the other foot, isn’t it?
Congress can and should stop this nonsense. The Judicial Conference is asking for new judgeships, and Congress has the power to refuse until the Conference agrees to back off its attempt to change case-assignment procedures. Congress must remind the judiciary who actually writes the laws in this country.
At the end of the day, if one side can use the courts to stop or delay a president’s policies, the other side has every right to do the same. The left can try to pretend their game is different, but it’s not. This push to eliminate single-judge divisions is just the latest in a long line of hypocritical, politically motivated stunts. Let’s hope Congress and the Supreme Court see it for what it is and shut it down.
