For four years, Trump supporters regularly exploited the federal judiciary, carefully selecting friendly judges in single-judge districts to block Biden administration policies through nationwide injunctions. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with courts regularly ruling against Trump’s executive actions, they’re crying foul — claiming an army of “radical leftist” judges has secretly infiltrated the courts.

The flood of judicial rulings against Trump isn’t coming from some shadowy cabal of leftist judges — it’s coming from Trump’s own unprecedented wave of executive actions while Congress sits idle. Law professor Steve Vladeck, who has been studying jurisdiction shopping extensively, recently analyzed the data and found that “the cause of this unprecedented flurry of judicial activity is neither the judges nor the courts; it’s the policies they’re reviewing.”

During the Biden administration, certain names became very familiar in major policy cases: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Judge Reed O’Connor, Judge Terry Doughty. This wasn’t coincidence — it was strategy. MAGA lawyers deliberately filed cases in jurisdictions with single judges known to be sympathetic to their cause, guaranteeing their cases would land before friendly faces.

Now that Trump is back in power, the people who loved the ability to go to a single judge knowing they’d likely rule against Biden and issue a nationwide injunction are suddenly freaking out and accusing those bringing suits of using far leftist radical Marxist judges. There’s just one big problem: it’s not true. At all.

Vladeck and his researchers find that, yes, courts are ruling against Trump frequently, but note that’s because he’s doing a ton of crazy shit, issuing over 100 executive orders while Congress is sitting on its hands. But, more importantly, there’s little evidence of the kind of judge shopping that MAGA was famous for the last four years:

With one fleeting exception, one of the 67 lawsuits we found in which interim relief has been sought against Trump administration policies have been filed in “single-judge divisions” (where a case has a 100% chance of being assigned to a specific judge). This kind of “judge-shopping” is distinct from “forum-shopping,” in which litigants with options pick where to file based on various factors, perhaps including the overall composition of the local bench. At least with regard to finding a way to bring a case so that a specific, hand-picked judge will be assigned to decide it, we haven’t seen any of those in the cases in our dataset.

(And if you’re wondering about that “fleeting” exception, that case was reassigned 24 hours later).

Indeed, they found that the one court in a “blue” state that has a single judge division (in Massachusetts) just quietly changed its rules so these kinds of cases (targeting nationwide injunctions) would be more randomly assigned across all 20 judges in the district. This stands in stark contrast to the response in Texas, where courts famous for judge shopping essentially refused to implement new policies meant to prevent it.

Meanwhile, Dems seem to be bending over backwards to make sure judge selection is random and fair. It’s almost as if one party wants to cheat and the other actually cares about judicial fairness. Crazy.

But… maybe everyone challenging Trump is still getting these supposed crazed Marxist judges. Well, the data again says “fuck no.”

To help make clear how the party of the President who appointed the relevant judge is not driving these rulings, of the 20 cases in our dataset that were assigned to Republican-appointed district judges, nine of those saw grants of a TRO and/or PI. Thus, even looking at the cases before Republican-appointed district court judges alone, plaintiffs have still obtained preliminary relief in 45% of the cases in which they’ve sought it. That’s … high.

One last point on the data: The only subset of appointees whose rulings have been uniform are district judges appointed by President Trump. Of the 67 cases we identified, eight have been assigned to judges Trump appointed between 2017 and 2021. In all eight of those cases, the district court denied interim relief. Whatever that says about Trump appointees, note what it says about judges appointed by previous Republican presidents: Of the 12 cases in our dataset assigned to such judges, nine of them have produced a TRO against the challenged policy, a PI, or both. I understand that there are those to whom you literally can’t be a Republican if you do anything to oppose Trump. But any claim that judges like John Bates, Richard Leon, and Royce Lamberth are liberal squishes betrays the claimant’s utter lack of seriousness.

The pattern here is striking: Trump-appointed judges protect Trump, while other Republican-appointed judges frequently rule against him when his actions violate the Constitution. Yet in MAGA world, this becomes evidence of some vast leftist conspiracy.

It’s a perfect example of the “every accusation is a confession” phenomenon. Having spent years actually gaming the judicial system through careful judge shopping, they assume everyone else must be doing the same thing — even when the evidence shows exactly the opposite.

And now, in a final twist of irony, MAGA forces are suddenly calling to eliminate nationwide injunctions entirely — the very tool they relied on repeatedly during the Biden years. It’s almost as if their only consistent principle is “whatever helps Trump.”

From Techdirt via this RSS feed