Here’s how the justice system is supposed to work: you bring your case, you get a judge, the judge applies the law, you win or you lose.
Here’s how Trump’s Justice Department apparently thinks it should work: you bring your case and you lose. You bring it somewhere else and you lose again. You keep losing. And then you find a courthouse in Texas where you’ve got a pretty good idea which judge is going to be sitting on the bench before you ever file the paperwork.
Welcome to the Northern District of Texas. According to new reporting from the New York Times, the DOJ has been steering major pieces of its agenda into this one district, where an unusual case-assignment system lets litigants effectively predict who’ll hear them. And one name keeps coming up: Judge Reed O’Connor.
O’Connor is a George W. Bush appointee, the district’s chief judge, and one of the most reliably conservative jurists on the federal bench. That alone isn’t the story — plenty of judges have strong views. The story is the plumbing.
Most federal district courts spread cases randomly across their judges. Northern Texas doesn’t always. Cases get assigned by the courthouse where they’re filed, and several of those courthouses have exactly one judge. So if you know who the only judge in a given courthouse is, and you file there — congratulations, you just picked your judge. Four of the district’s seven courthouses funnel every case to a single Trump-appointed judge. Another sends everything to O’Connor. And in Fort Worth, 90 percent of cases split between O’Connor and Trump appointee Mark Pittman.
That’s not “find a conservative jurisdiction and hope.” That’s knowing the name before you print the cover sheet.
Watch how DOJ actually used it. The administration has been trying to pry loose medical records tied to transgender care for minors. Federal judges in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Seattle either rejected or sharply limited those demands. Five cities, five walls.
So they went to Fort Worth. Never mind that the hospital whose records they wanted was in Rhode Island, or that Texas had already banned the very care being investigated. DOJ argued its nationwide investigation was being run out of Northern Texas — which put the case in front of O’Connor, who granted the request, clearing the way for Rhode Island Hospital to hand over personal information including the names and Social Security numbers of minors who’d received treatment.
Sit with that sequence. Courts all over the country tell you no. You relocate to a courthouse where you have a strong hunch who’ll hear you. Suddenly it’s yes.
A federal judge in Rhode Island, Mary McElroy, saw exactly what was happening. She accused DOJ lawyers of running a “crusade to obtain transgender children’s medical records” and bolting from her court for a distant venue they considered friendly. In a hearing she called the tactic “dirty pool,” and told a Justice Department lawyer to his face: “You chose Judge O’Connor in Texas. Let’s just admit that.”
That’s a federal judge saying that to the United States Department of Justice.
Here’s the part that really gets me: the judiciary already saw this coming. In 2024 the Judicial Conference of the United States recommended that big cases challenging federal or state policy be assigned randomly across judges — specifically to deter judge shopping and protect public confidence in an impartial court. Reasonable.
The Northern District of Texas refused to adopt it. Later that year, O’Connor personally went after the policy in a speech to the Federalist Society, framing critics of his district as trying to undermine the judiciary. So this was never some hidden loophole. The system flagged the problem, proposed a fix, Northern Texas said no — and now the DOJ is exploiting the precise mechanism everyone was warned about.
There’s a rich hypocrisy underneath all of this. Trump and his allies never stop howling about “rogue judges.” Any federal judge who blocks him becomes an activist, a radical, an enemy of democracy. But a single district judge wielding enormous power is apparently only a threat when the judge tells Trump no. When the judge hands him what he wants, suddenly everyone’s a champion of judicial independence.
And O’Connor has a record worth knowing. He struck down the entire Affordable Care Act in 2018 — a ruling the Supreme Court later reversed 7-2. The Court has tossed other decisions of his on gun regulation and Native American adoption law. Holding conservative legal views doesn’t disqualify anyone from the bench; that’s not the point. The point is what happens when litigants know those views and can choose where to file to all but guarantee that particular judge hears the case.
Let’s be honest about something: judge shopping isn’t exclusively a GOP move. Democratic administrations and liberal groups have gone looking for friendly ground too. But there’s a real difference between choosing a jurisdiction where the pool of judges might lean your way, and choosing a courthouse where you can name the individual judge in advance. One is forum shopping. The other starts to look a hell of a lot like picking the referee.
That’s why this should bother you no matter your politics — because eventually the judge being handpicked won’t share yours. If Democrats retake power and start deliberately routing major cases into courthouses where they know they’ll draw one specific progressive judge, Republicans will lose their minds. And they’d have a point.
I’ve spent most of my adult life around the justice system, and it only functions if people believe the rules apply the same regardless of who walks through the door. You don’t get to choose the cop who investigates you. You don’t get to choose your jury. And you shouldn’t effectively get to choose your judge just because you know which courthouse to walk into. Justice can’t mean shopping for the government official most likely to agree with you.
That’s what makes this bigger than one judge in Texas. Trump doesn’t need to abolish institutions to break them. You hollow them out. You exploit the loopholes. You smear the judges who rule against you as corrupt while quietly seeking out the ones who keep ruling in your favor. Do that long enough and people stop believing any of it is impartial — and a justice system the public believes is rigged isn’t much of a justice system at all.
If we want these institutions to outlast Trump, and whoever comes after him, the rules can’t bend to whoever happens to hold power. So assign the cases at random. Because you shouldn’t get to pick your judge. Period.
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