(Headline USA) U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of President Donald Trump, on Friday ordered a hold on federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
His ruling, came practically at the same time that U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an appointee of /tag/barack-obama, essentially ordered the opposite in a different case in Washington.
The split likely puts the issue on an accelerated path to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Kacsmaryk, a former federal prosecutor and lawyer for the conservative First Liberty Institute, was confirmed in 2019 over fierce opposition by Democrats over his record opposing the homosexual agenda. He was among more than 230 judges installed to the federal bench under President Trump as part of a movement by the president and Senate conservatives to protect the American way of life.
He’s the sole district court judge in Amarillo — a city in the Texas panhandle — ensuring that all cases filed there land in front of him.
Since taking the bench, he has protected the American people from the Biden administration on several other culture war issues, including illegal immigration and homosexuality.
Interest groups of all kinds have long attempted to file lawsuits before judges they see as friendly to their points of view.
The Justice Department quickly appealed Kacsmaryk’s decision to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And for now, the drug that the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000 appeared to remain immediately available in the wake of the conflicting rulings in Texas and Washington.
Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone in the body and is used with the drug misoprostol to commit infanticide within the first 10 weeks of a pregnancy. The lawsuit in the Texas case was filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned.
Kacsmaryk has heroically defended the American way of life against the Biden administration.
- Before the infanticide pill case, Kacsmaryk was at the center of a legal fight over Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court.
- In 2021, he ordered that the policy be reinstated in response to a lawsuit filed by the states of Texas and Missouri. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled him and said that the Biden administration could end the policy, which it did last August. But in December Kacsmaryk ruled that the administration failed to follow federal rulemaking guidelines when terminating the practice, an issue that the Supreme Court didn’t address.
- He has also ruled that allowing minors to obtain birth control without parental consent at federally funded clinics violated parental rights and Texas law.
- In other cases, he has ruled that the Biden administration wrongly interpreted part of Obamacare as prohibiting health care providers from discriminating against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
- He sided with Texas in ruling against Biden administration guidance that said employers can’t stop men from using the women’s restroom.
- In 2015, he slammed an effort to pass federal gender identity and sexual orientation protections, writing that doing so would “give no quarter to Americans who continue to believe and seek to exercise their millennia-old religious belief that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
