Five Things You Should Know About Matthew Kacsmaryk


President Trump nominated Matthew Kacsmaryk to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on his nomination this morning. Here are a few troubling things you should know about his record:

  1. He sarcastically described Roe v. Wade as follows: “On January 22, 1973, seven justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to abortion hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the shadowy ‘penumbras’ of the Bill of Rights, a celestial phenomenon invisible to the non-lawyer eye.”
  2. He likewise criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, writing sardonically: “On June 26, five justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right to same-sex marriage hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—a secret knowledge so cleverly concealed in the nineteenth-century amendment that it took almost 150 years to find.”
  3. He opposed the Equality Act, introduced after the Obergefell decision, which would have added protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity to federal law.
  4. He objected to rules interpreting Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national origin, age, or disability, for including gender identity, sex stereotyping, and termination of pregnancy under sex discrimination.
  5. He criticized “the campaigns for same-sex ‘marriage and ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ legislation,” writing that “sexual revolutionaries are litigating and legislating” to remove “sexual difference and complementarity,” which he described as a “pillar of marriage law.”

In the interest of time and space, I only listed five things – but rest assured there is much more that warrants the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny.