'A MAGA Judge’s Shocking Power Grab Crosses Over Into an Impeachable Offense'
An ultrapartisan federal judge issued a stunning and possibly unprecedented order on Monday that simultaneously violated the rights of vulnerable children and the lawyers trying to protect them. At the Trump administration’s bidding, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor—who sits in Texas—commanded Rhode Island Hospital to give him sensitive information about minors who received gender-affirming care, including their private medical records and Social Security numbers. He then issued an injunction claiming to prohibit the hospital from seeking relief in the federal courts that oversee Rhode Island under threat of contempt. And he barred the hospital from “aiding and abetting” any other party that might ask for help from these courts, including the children whose rights will be trampled by disclosure of their records.
O’Connor’s order is an extreme abuse of power that verges on impeachable misconduct. He has absolutely no authority to prevent any party from seeking relief in another court, let alone the home courts with natural jurisdiction over this dispute. Nor may he gag any litigant from “aiding and abetting” others who wish to make their case in those courts; these prohibitions read more like the diktat of an autocrat than the lawful directive of a jurist. O’Connor’s massive overreach seems designed to tee up a constitutional crisis over the ability of MAGA judges to facilitate the administration’s persecution of blue-state residents many miles away. It also tests the resolve of judges in those blue states to hold the line against distant conservative courts attempting to encroach upon their constitutional authority at the president’s behest.
The Trump administration set off this conflict when it issued a subpoena seeking to compel Rhode Island Hospital to turn over a mountain of information about transgender minors whom it had treated. This demand was part of a nationwide assault on doctors who offer gender-affirming care, and seven courts had already blocked similar subpoenas issued against other providers. The basic problem, as these courts identified, is that the government failed to accuse these doctors of any plausibly unlawful conduct, rendering the subpoenas invalid. When the Justice Department took aim at RIH, however, it sought to enforce its subpoena not in the Rhode Island federal courthouse. Instead, it went to O’Connor’s court, in Fort Worth, Texas, and asked him for an order to enforce the subpoena. (O’Connor, a far-right partisan, invites Republicans to shop their cases to his court.) He complied without even allowing RIH the opportunity to respond, directing the hospital to give the government the records it sought.
RIH, joined by Rhode Island’s Office of the Child Advocate (a state agency), then asked for the federal court in Rhode Island to quash the subpoena. On Wednesday, Judge Mary S. McElroy of the state’s U.S. District Court did just that. McElroy castigated the DOJ for “appalling” and “reckless disregard for the duty of candor” while calling out O’Connor for playing along with the department’s brazen judge shopping. Most important, she outmaneuvered the Texas judge by quashing the subpoena itself, finding that it was an illegitimate and unconstitutional invasion of privacy. By rendering the subpoena a nullity, McElroy left O’Connor nothing to enforce, making his earlier order toothless.
On Monday, however, O’Connor struck back with a shocking order that used wildly inappropriate intimidation tactics to wrest back control of the case. In a testy opinion, he rejected the conclusion reached by McElroy (and seven other courts) that the subpoena is invalid, as well as repeated accusations against RIH that McElroy had found to be “deceptive, if not intentionally and knowingly false.” He decried RIH’s pleas for relief in Rhode Island’s federal court as “flagrant attempts to avoid compliance with lawful orders” designed to “circumvent the authority of this court.” And he ordered RIH to give him all the documents demanded by the government’s subpoena by Tuesday, implying that the hospital might destroy these records if he did not obtain them immediately.
In reality, RIH had every right to ask McElroy for relief. Indeed, the hospital’s attempt to litigate this case in Rhode Island—where it is located—is far more defensible than the DOJ’s efforts to drag the fight to Fort Worth, 1,750 miles away. Yet O’Connor condemned RIH’s move as an underhanded gambit to “circumvent” his authority, as though he alone had a claim to litigate this dispute and McElroy was an impudent interloper. Only a judge drunk on unaccountable power could mistake a party’s right to petition its own courts for a gross act of defiance.
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[O’Connor] is evidently eager to escalate this skirmish into full-on judicial warfare over his self-proclaimed right to rule over Rhode Island, its citizens, and its federal courts. At stake is the prerogative of uncaptured judges to enforce the law free from interference by robed partisans halfway across the country.
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