Opinion: Matthew Kacsmaryk calls the right-leaning judicial branch's bluff

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Opinion | Matthew Kacsmaryk calls the right-leaning judicial branch’s bluff

By David Von Drehle
Deputy opinion editor and columnist
April 12, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

I suppose it is childish to be bothered by the rank hypocrisy of politicians, or to be disappointed at finding politicians wrapped in robes and salted into the federal judiciary. But when the “conservative” overhaul of the courts, decades in the making, ultimately results in the likes of U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, the travesty cannot go unremarked. ... Since the 1960s, if not earlier, self-styled legal conservatives have been saying — with perfectly straight faces — that judges must not legislate from the bench. They carried copies of the Constitution around in their pockets and waved them as proof that the United States has three branches of government. Elected legislators make the laws. Elected presidents sign and execute the laws.

As for unelected judges: They should be as modest and unassuming as a crossing guard in a Mennonite village where all the horses are old and footsore. Judges don’t make the laws. They don’t execute the laws. They just read the laws, preferably with their lips moving and their hearts full of reverence, scanning patiently until the original intentions of the Founders take shape on the blank canvas of the judicial mind. ... Was it all a lie? Of course it was, though folks have another word for it when they put a foot wrong in the stables around Amarillo, Tex.

[Ruth Marcus: The worst federal judge in America now has a name]

Amarillo is where so-called conservatives have engineered a cynical judicial tyranny in the person of Kacsmaryk. Formerly an attorney for the First Liberty Institute, a right-wing Christian law firm, Kacsmaryk has written that Roman Catholic doctrine concerning marriage, family and sexuality — including a hard line against abortion and even contraception — should be codified in American law. I’m not sure where he came up with that, but it certainly was not from the Founding Fathers. “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?” John Adams mused to Thomas Jefferson. No, Jefferson opined: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.”

The beauty of Amarillo for the hypocrites of the right is that it’s home to just one federal judge. Therefore, lawsuits filed in Amarillo will not be assigned by lottery but will instead be heard, almost inevitably, by the judge in residence. ... Just how far he would venture into lawlessness was revealed when the Amarillo freelancer shrugged off all deference to the other branches of government to assert his personal power to undo approval of a medicine cleared for American patients some 20 years ago: mifepristone, used to induce miscarriages early in pregnancy and prescribed as part of the most common abortion procedure in the United States.

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Opinion by David Von Drehle
David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.” Twitter https://twitter.com/DavidVonDrehle

[grumpyduck]

1. Prick.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

2. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But this guy only has only temporarily

halted nothing.

Science has already won on this issue, the priest in judicial robes in his assigned judicial parish… contrary to the rule of law being blind..is on some kind of personal crusade.

Priests and judges were once the same thing. That some still pine for those days is what is astonishing. Must never have studied much American history, or choose to ignore it.