Meet the Amarillo judge at the center of an FDA abortion drug case

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When anti-abortion groups wanted to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of an abortion-inducing drug, they didn’t sue in Maryland, where the FDA is headquartered, or in any state. where the pill is still legally prescribed.

They dropped her off in Amarillo, a town in Texas that didn’t have an abortion clinic even before the state banned the procedure.

But Amarillo has a federal courthouse with, above all, a single presiding federal judge. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk hears 95% of cases filed in Amarillo.

Before Kacsmaryk was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2019, he was an associate attorney at First Liberty Institute, a deeply conservative religious liberty law firm based in Plano.

Under his leadership, First Liberty was embroiled in several legal battles over reproductive health care, including trying to block the “contraception mandate” that required health insurers to pay for birth control. Kacsmaryk himself was franc in his opposition to LGBTQ rights.

Since Kacsmaryk joined the bench, the Texas Attorney General and private litigants have brought their most contentious lawsuits to Amarillo, largely with the desired outcome. He reinstated the Trump-era “stay in Mexico” politics on behalf of Texas. He dashed efforts of the Biden administration to protect LGBTQ workers and trans youth. And he ruled that a longtime federal program that gives teens confidential birth control violated state law.

The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the anti-abortion group challenging the FDA approval of mifepristone, is based in Tennessee. But the group incorporated an Amarillo outpost in August 2022, according to records from the Texas secretary of state’s office, three months before the lawsuit was filed. One of the plaintiffs is a doctor from Dumas, north of Amarillo, who says he and his patients were harmed by the FDA approval of the drug.

Context of religious freedom

Kacsmaryk attended Abilene Christian University and the University of Texas Law School before working in private practice at Baker Botts and serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District.

In 2014, he joined the First Liberty Institute as Assistant General Counsel. First Freedom, formerly Liberty Institute, is a religious liberty legal group based in Plano. His attorneys have argued several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, including one in which the High Court found that a school district discriminated against a football coach who prayed in margin after a game.

At First Liberty, Kacsmaryk challenged the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control and emergency contraception like the morning after pill. In one lawsuit, First Liberty argued that the supply of these drugs, which they claimed caused abortion, violated the plaintiff’s sincere religious beliefs.

First Liberty settled the lawsuit in 2017 after the Trump administration changed the requirement to exempt those with “conscientious objections” from providing contraception.

“Our clients have been suing the government’s efforts to punish business owners and ministry heads for following their religious beliefs and moral convictions since 2013,” Kacsmaryk said. said in a press release at the time. “As President Trump has recognized…it is time to reaffirm “America’s leadership role as a nation that protects religious freedom for all.”

In 2015, as the United States Supreme Court considered whether states should permit and recognize same-sex marriages, Kacsmaryk wrote an essay in the National Catholic Register titled “The abolition of man… and woman.” He argued that “sex revolutionaries” had desecrated marriage by allowing no-fault divorce, decriminalizing adultery, and legalizing contraception and abortion.

If the Supreme Court struck down the ‘last pillar of marriage law’ – whether it be between a man and a woman – it would lead to a ‘clash of absolutes’ between religious denominations that see gender as binary and communities LGBTQ who believe, in Kacsmaryk’s words, “the human person is more like a pluripotent cell whose sex and sexuality are subject to autonomous self-definition”.

In 2016, Kacsmaryk advised parents who successfully challenged the Fort Worth Independent School District’s new policies allowing students to use restrooms and pronouns aligned with their gender identity.

“It is not diversity but displacement, the absolutist imposition of a sexually revolutionized vision of the human person without any accommodation for religious dissidents who may have a different vision of man and woman, of man and woman, Kacsmaryk told the Daily Signal.

Kacsmaryk has volunteered for a number of conservative candidates in Texas, including Gov. Greg Abbott and the Senses. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. He also founded the Fort Worth chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that played an outsized role in choosing judicial nominees under the Trump administration.

Many of Kacsmaryk’s anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ positions were raised during his judicial nomination process. Major LGBTQ advocacy groups opposed his appointment. US Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said it was “really hard to imagine anyone less qualified to sit on the federal bench.”

“Every American deserves judges on the bench who protect their constitutional rights, not one who will try to snatch them away,” Merkley said in 2019.

Kacsmaryk’s former First Liberty colleague Jeff Mateer lost his chance at a federal judgeship after his comments calling transgender children are part of “Satan’s plan” came to light.

But Kacsmaryk was confirmedin a vote of 52 to 46, and began his lifetime appointment in June 2019. During his Senate hearing, he vowed to be fair.

“As a judge, I am no longer in the role of a lawyer,” he said. “I am in the role of reading and applying in good faith any Supreme Court and 5th Circuit precedent that is binding.”

Why so many cases end up in Amarillo

It’s no coincidence that this reliable conservative judge ends up hearing controversial cases brought by right-wing law firms, private litigants and the state of Texas.

It is very common for lawyers to file their case in the district that gives them the best chance of victory. But the design of Texas’ federal court system facilitates “judge shop,” while ensuring that a specific judge will hear a case, said Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Texas has four federal district courts, which are further divided into 27 divisions. Each district court sets its own rules for assigning cases, but generally cases are randomly assigned to judges in each division. Houston, for example, divides cases among seven full-time judges and five senior judges who have a reduced caseload. But outside of the state’s urban centers, there are fewer judges to share the burden.

“For reasons that are not remotely nefarious and that are entirely historical and geographic, it has long been the norm in Texas that in the most remote areas of the state, divisions are staffed with a single judge,” Vladeck said.

Texas has nine single-judge divisions and 10 divisions with only two judges; those staffed entirely by Trump appointees have been busy recently. Of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 26 challenges to the Biden administration, seven were filed before Kacsmaryk and seven before U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton in Victoria, who has a reputation for being conservative on matters of immigrants.

Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, said judge shopping is nothing new, citing examples dating back to the civil rights movement.

“Lawyers have a duty to file a case in a district that best serves [their] customer,” he said. “If Planned Parenthood were to take legal action in Judge Kacsmaryk’s court, it would be malpractice. You choose the forum that suits you best.

The US Department of Justice recently tried to block this practice, filing motions to transfer cases out of Kacsmaryk and Tipton courtrooms.

“The case does not arise out of any event or omission that occurred in the Northern District of Texas, let alone the Amarillo Division,” the motion before Kacsmaryk reads. “Plaintiffs’ decision to forum shop by filing in the Northern District – and, in particular, the Amarillo Single Judge Division, which is unrelated to this dispute – undermines public confidence in the administration of Justice.”

No judge is likely to decide to remove cases from their own courtroom. But those filings can elevate the problem to those who could change the rules, Vladeck said: chief justices in each district, who could reallocate cases, or Congress, which could institute more uniform rules across the board.

In the meantime, however, the primary avenue for challenging Texas district court rulings is through the New Orleans-based 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which is known to be equally conservative. . Only a small portion of cases will end up being heard by the United States Supreme Court.

“Texas district courts are losing in the Supreme Court,” Vladeck said. “But by the time it happens no one has noticed because for two years they got away with it.”

Disclosure: Planned Parenthood, the Texas Secretary of State, and the University of Texas at Austin financially supported The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the journalism of the Tribune. Find a suit list here.