Steve Vladeck
@steve_vladeck

In a new order filed today, the Southern District of Texas has eliminated the single-judge division in Victoria. Going forward, new civil cases filed in Victoria have a 50/50 shot of being assigned to Judge Morales (Trump appointee) or Judge Ramos (Obama)

https://txs.uscourts.gov/district/genord

Of note, the order does not get rid of the Southern District’s *other* single-judge division (Galveston, where Judge Brown hears 100% of new civil cases).

So this appears to be more specific to divvying up Victoria cases rather than eliminating single-judge divisions writ large.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Senate passed an abortion ban on Thursday in the Republican-led chamber's latest quest to craft a law that passes constitutional muster, but differences with a stricter proposal from the House could derail the effort once again.

Republicans have faced several setbacks in their efforts to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal protections this summer, allowing the conservative state's previous ban to take effect.

First, a special session spanning a dozen meetings throughout the summer and fall resulted in no new ban when neither chamber budged from their respective proposals. Then, just days before lawmakers convened this January, the state's highest court narrowly struck down a 2021 law banning abortion after cardiac activity is detected around six weeks of pregnancy.

With Thursday's 28-12 vote, Senate Republicans insist they have found their solution in a ban on abortions after cardiac activity is detected around six weeks of pregnancy. Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey emphasized that several clarifications of the bill’s language and repeals of conflicting laws will satisfy a majority on the South Carolina Supreme Court.

The Senate measure includes exceptions for rape, incest, fatal fetal anomaly and the patient’s life and health up to 12 weeks. Meanwhile, a full ban from conception has again advanced to the House floor in a development that threatens to prevent another abortion restriction from becoming law in South Carolina.

Nearly two dozen states with Republican attorneys general on Friday announced their support for a lawsuit seeking to end access to the use of mifepristone for medication abortions.

Hours later, nearly two dozen other states, with Democratic attorneys general, announced their opposition to the lawsuit.

The filings came in a lawsuit brought by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom this past fall. The case, before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, has garnered attention due to its extreme requests, its extremist plaintiffs and lawyers, and the extremist judge they sought out to hear the case.

For the past three months, it could be said that this was a case of extremes.

On Friday, however, nearly half of the attorneys general across the country made clear that the effort to end medication abortion is the national Republican position.

In the first brief, led by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, she argued for Mississippi and 21 other states, “For two decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acted to establish a nationwide regime of on-demand abortion by licensing sweeping access to chemical abortion drugs—in defiance of federal and state laws protecting life, health, and safety.” The filing urged the federal court not only to reverse recent changes making medication abortion more easily accessible but also the initial federal approval of mifepristone more than 20 years ago.

After four years of punishing the people of Florida with actions largely meant to increase his personal power, Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be bringing his corrosive brand of politics to a presidential run. But DeSantis only looks like an even remotely reasonable or centrist candidate when viewed in a line-up between his gubernatorial predecessor Rick Scott and ex-U.S. catastrophe Donald Trump. That he sits comfortably between the two, accompanied by a host of extremists, should be cause for alarm, not suggestions that he is anything other than an authoritarian.

While the slogan “Make America Florida” gains traction on bumper stickers and pundits debate DeSantis’ electability, DeSantis continues to plunge ahead with culture wars in schools that sunder communities, gaslight Floridians about the environment, and implement anti-scientific policies across life-or-death situations. But there is still—even after three years of a badly mishandled pandemic—nothing to apologize for, nothing to be accountable for, and nothing to be transparent about, to anyone.

A Florida political system that has over the course of several Republican governors maximized voter suppression and gerrymandering has contributed to DeSantis’ unprecedented ability to centralize power in Florida and muffled most effective opposition. It is in this context of restricting voting rights, too, that disastrous policy decisions opposed by millions of Floridians have been portrayed as somehow not subpar, but superlative. In certain quarters, these policies are bally-hoo’d as a form of “freedom” and “liberty.”

Just like destructive Republican governors before him feathered the nest for DeSantis's success by destroying safeguards and institutions—making it possible for DeSantis to become more predatory and authoritarian—Trump has set the table for DeSantis at the national level. Trump's coalition of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, disgruntled rightwing journalists, and evangelicals now becomes how DeSantis, who otherwise might be unelectable, can see a path to the White House.

During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden criticized Republicans for proposing to “sunset” Medicare and Social Security every five years. In response, many Republican lawmakers booed the president, prompting him to quip, “So, folks, as we all apparently agree: Social Security and Medicare is off the books now.”

Perhaps these Republicans really do disagree with a plan put forth by a member of their leadership mandating periodic expiration of popular entitlement spending. But at least some of their judges are all for it—and want to transform the idea into constitution law. Recently, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals crafted a theory that would empower courts to strike down mandatory spending on federal programs, compelling Congress to either reappropriate the money or let the programs die. This radical and antidemocratic reading of the Constitution would threaten Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, unemployment benefits, child nutrition assistance, and so much more. Democrats and Republicans would be foolish to ignore the rebellion against federal spending that’s brewing in the 5th Circuit.

The conservative assault on entitlement programs arose during litigation against a frequent target of GOP ire: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency created in 2010 that protects Americans against exploitative fraud and deceit in home mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans, and retail banking. For years now, right-wing litigators have argued that the CFPB is unconstitutional because it is funded independently: The agency draws its budget from the Federal Reserve, which in turn draws its budget from interest on securities. Because Congress does not directly appropriate money to the CFPB every year, lawyers claimed, its funding violates the Constitution’s appropriations clause.

At least seven different federal courts dismissed this theory until it landed in the 5th Circuit, the nation’s Trumpiest appeals court. In May 2022, Judge Edith Jones—a Ronald Reagan appointee and hard-right bomb-thrower—wrote a 39-page concurrence asserting that the CFPB is funded unconstitutionally. Four other judges joined her. Then, in October, a three-judge panel formally declared that the CFPB’s independent budget mechanism renders the entire agency unconstitutional. Judge Cory Wilson, writing for the panel, revoked the CFPB’s ability to issue or enforce any regulations. (All three members of the panel were appointed by Donald Trump.) Thus, under the current law of the 5th Circuit, the CFPB effectively does not exist.

You might wonder: What does this skirmish over a small financial agency have to do with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual entitlement spending? The answer: everything. In her concurrence, Jones took pains to clarify that her reasoning was not limited to the CFPB. Jones announced that all “appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.”

Members of Congress introduced legislation Thursday that would prohibit schools that receive federal funding from collecting or requiring information regarding students’ menstrual cycles, according to a news release from the U.S. House.

The move came the same day that Florida athletic leaders agreed to remove questions about athletes' menstrual history from annual registration forms. An investigation by The Palm Bach Post found that 35 states ask athletes about their periods and require them to turn in the answers to their school districts.

U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff (D-California), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who represents parts of West Palm Beach and western Palm Beach County, introduced the legislation after they said the questions are a "roundabout way of discriminating against trans students that would also subject cisgender students to invasive government mandates of their private medical data."

A South Carolina State judge has been confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, reinforcing a Democratic majority on what was once considered among the most conservative appellate courts in the country.

DeAndrea Gist Benjamin is taking the seat of Judge Henry F. Floyd, who assumed senior status in late 2021. She previously served on South Carolina’s Fifth Judicial Circuit, where she presided over hundreds of jury trials; before that, she worked as both a state prosecutor and an employment lawyer.

Jan 26, 2023

Steve Vladeck
@steve_vladeck

Yesterday’s tweet about Texas’s judge-shopping is *already* out of date.

Paxton filed suit number 26 today in Amarillo (which has a 100% chance of drawing Judge Kacsmaryk), challenging a new Labor Department rule about investment of pension trust assets:

https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/press/2023.01.26_1%20Complaint.pdf

Feb 8, 2023

Steve Vladeck
@steve_vladeck

Just like it did with the immigration-related suit Texas filed two weeks ago in Victoria, DOJ is also now moving to transfer Texas’s challenge to a new DOL rule re: pension trust assets—which was filed in Amarillo (where it had a 100% chance of being assigned to Judge Kacsmaryk).

In other words, DOJ is now openly resisting Texas’s efforts to exploit single-judge divisions in its (repeated) lawsuits seeking nationwide injunctions against new Biden Administration policies — increasing the odds that #SCOTUS will eventually have to address the practice.

Here's a link to the full filing from the Department of Justice asking Judge Kacsmaryk to transfer the case either to D.C. or to another division within the Northern District in which more than one judge can be assigned new civil cases:

https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/15.pdf

Business profile picture
The Recount
@therecount

Mocking congressional Republicans who called him a “liar” for saying some Republicans want to sunset Social Security and Medicare, President Biden reads direct quotes from Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ron Johnson (R-WI).

The Recount
@therecount

Biden brought some light reading to Wisconsin.

WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Texas sued the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday to prevent it from asking pharmacies to fill reproductive health prescriptions.

The Biden administration said in July 2022 that refusing to fill prescriptions for drugs that could be used to terminate a pregnancy could violate federal law, regardless of various state bans on the procedure.

This guidance from the Biden administration, which involved roughly 60,000 U.S. retail pharmacies, came days after Biden signed an executive order easing access to services to terminate pregnancies after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortions legal nationwide.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late on Tuesday.

"The Biden Administration knows that it has no legal authority to institute this radical abortion agenda, so now it's trying to intimidate every pharmacy in America by threatening to withhold federal funds," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement on Tuesday.