Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks Urging Immediate Adoption Of Recently Announced Judicial Conference Policy Reforms To Limit Judge Shopping

Washington, D.C. –  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the importance of courts immediately adopting the Judicial Conference’s recent policy reforms limiting the practice of judge shopping. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

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 yesterday 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, can pick and choose which judge hears their case – which is what’s happened, for instance, in the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo, where cascades of cases are being filed by right wing groups across the country – when this happens, when right-wing groups 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 was 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 judge shopping. It’s awful.

I applaud the Judicial Conference for taking the initiative to limit judge shopping. I urged courts across the country to apply these new reforms. And when my Republican colleagues say they support this, it shows they’re not for fairness of a judicial system – they’re for outcome determination ahead of time, before even cases are argued.

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