[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 51 (Friday, March 22, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S2556]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Judicial Conference

  Mr. President, on judge shopping, yesterday, I sent a letter to the 
Judicial Conference urging them to defend their new, commonsense policy 
reforms limiting the practice of judge shopping.
  I also sent a letter to the chief judge of the Northern District of 
Texas, where judge shopping is running rampant, urging the district to 
apply the reforms of the Judicial Conference as quickly as possible.
  The bottom line is this: Judge shopping jaundices the fairness of our 
entire legal system. When hard-right plaintiffs, often funded by hard-
right groups that just hire the lawyers, when they can pick and choose 
which judge hears their case--which is what has happened, for instance, 
in the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo, where cascades of cases 
are being filed by rightwing groups across the country--when this 
happens, when hard-right plaintiffs can pick and choose which judge 
hears their case, it distorts the system and causes the American people 
to lose faith in our courts.
  Judge shopping is precisely what led to the terrible case in the 
Northern District of Texas, where anti-choice extremists handpicked a 
MAGA judge--the only one sitting--to revoke FDA approval of 
mifepristone nationwide. This one judge, extreme right--known as 
extreme right before he became a judge and after--gets to choose for 
the whole country because of forum shopping.
  It is awful. I applaud the Judicial Conference for taking the 
initiative to limit judge shopping. I urge the courts across the 
country to apply these new reforms.
  And when my Republican colleagues say they support this, it shows 
they are not for fairness of a judicial system; they are for outcome 
determination ahead of time before even cases are argued.