In the recent past, the Republican Party’s culture war crusade included a great many issues, from reproductive rights to LGBTQ+ rights to privatizing public education through school vouchers. Energy efficiency standards for home appliances, however, were not in the mix.
That’s clearly changed.
Congressional Republicans have been unsubtle in their obsession with the issue, hoping to give voters the impression that President Joe Biden is on his way to their home, wrench in hand, desperate to take their appliances away. Donald Trump is engaged on this, too, of course, telling an audience in Michigan over the weekend, “Today you read where they don’t want to have any water in your dishwasher, so your dishwasher won’t work, and they think that’s good.”
But the former president and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill aren’t alone. Reuters had this report late last week:
A conservative think tank has filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Energy’s new energy-efficiency requirements for household clothes washers and dishwashers, arguing the Biden administration lacked authority to adopt the regulations. The Competitive Enterprise Institute on Thursday filed a lawsuit on behalf of two consumers in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, a venue popular among conservative litigants whose sole judge is an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump.
Broadly speaking, there are a couple of angles to this story. The first is the idea that the Biden administration’s energy efficiency standards for home appliances should be blocked, which is awfully difficult to take seriously, Republican hysterics notwithstanding.
But the second is the specific court in which the plaintiffs filed their case.
As regular readers know, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed jurist in Texas, has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s most controversial federal judges. It was, for example, Kacsmaryk who took it upon himself to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone last year, relying in large part on highly dubious studies — which have since been retracted. (The ruling was ultimately overturned for procedural reasons.)
When a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule in Texas that would require firearms dealers to run background checks on buyers at gun shows, that was Kacsmaryk, too.
Now, a conservative group wants to challenge energy efficiency standards, and wouldn’t you know it, the organization’s lawyers thought it’d be a good idea to file the case in Kacsmaryk’s district. Imagine that. The tactic goes by different names. I’ve seen it referred to as “forum shopping,” “judge shopping,” “venue shopping,” and “court shopping,” but the phrases all mean the same thing: Instead of simply taking one’s chances in the judiciary, many litigants effectively try to hand-pick ideologically aligned jurists, filing their cases in specific districts in the hopes of guaranteeing success before the process even begins in earnest. In Trump’s hush-money case, his GOP allies were invested in the idea that prosecutors engaged in court shopping, pursuing an indictment in a court where a conviction was more likely. That never made any sense: Trump’s crimes were committed in the district in which he was charged. If Republicans are looking for some actual examples of court shopping, I’d refer them to Kacsmaryk’s docket.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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