As the Trump administration continues to fight a flurry of legal attacks, a familiar tactic is emerging: The left is gaming the court system to block his policies by forum shopping, the practice of filing lawsuits in specific courts where the odds favor a liberal ruling.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. RealClearInvestigations analyzed 350 lawsuits targeting the Trump administration and found that 80% were filed in just 11 out of the 91 federal district courts in the country. Those 11 courts? They all have one thing in common: Democrat-appointed judges dominate the bench, RealClearPolitics reported.
In fact, while Democratic presidents appointed about 60% of active federal judges overall, every one of those 11 courts leaned even harder to the left. Some of them are practically guaranteed to hand cases to judges picked by Obama, Clinton, or Biden.
Critics of the administration call this just the natural consequence of Trump’s “overreach,” and yes, some Republican-appointed judges have ruled against Trump. But the numbers tell the real story. When it comes to the harshest legal weapon, nationwide injunctions, Democrat-appointed judges are overwhelmingly the ones issuing them.
These are rulings that don’t just affect the plaintiff; they freeze Trump’s policies across the entire country.
Nearly 40 such universal injunctions have been handed down against the Trump administration so far. More than four out of five of those came from judges appointed by Democrats.
Take the D.C. District Court, where 41% of all cases RCI examined were filed. That’s 143 cases in one court, nearly half the legal war against Trump, RCI found, noting that 73% of the active judges there were appointed by Democratic presidents.
This is the same court that handled the Jan. 6 trials and where judges like Tanya Chutkan and Beryl Howell have taken aim at Trump allies like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Peter Navarro.
Next in line, the district courts of Massachusetts and Maryland. Both are over 90% stacked with Democrat-appointed judges. Again, these aren’t random locations. They’re carefully selected battlegrounds where the left knows the deck is stacked.
Now to be fair, district courts do technically assign cases randomly, but only within that district. And each district has its own way of doing things. Some districts, especially in Texas, assign cases to specific judges based on where the lawsuit is filed. That’s how conservatives brought a case against the abortion pill mifepristone in Amarillo, Texas, where it was practically guaranteed to land on the desk of a single, pro-life judge.
In 2023, Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer threw a fit over that. He demanded changes to prevent litigants from “hand-picking their preferred judges.” The irony is that is exactly what left-wing groups have been doing for years. They’re just upset that conservatives figured out how to play the same game.
The Judicial Conference of the United States has since issued nonbinding guidance encouraging random case assignments across entire districts, but that guidance has no teeth. And as Schumer himself admitted, “Congress will consider more prescriptive requirements” if the courts don’t act. In other words, politicians want to control which judges get which cases.
Despite bipartisan talk about curbing forum shopping, nothing has changed. And why would it? For the left, it’s been working.
And with universal injunctions becoming the go-to tool for tying the hands of a sitting president, the incentive to shop for favorable courts has never been higher. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on whether these sweeping injunctions are even constitutional.
If the high court reins them in, it might finally slam the brakes on a tactic that’s turned the judiciary into a partisan battlefield, one where the law takes a backseat to politics, and a handful of judges can freeze the will of a duly elected president.
