“The worst federal judge in America” is how The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus aptly describes Matthew Kacsmaryk, the religious zealot blithely nominated by Donald Trump to the federal judiciary on the advice of the right-wing Federalist Society. It’s possible—even probable—that the pathologically incurious Trump himself knew next to nothing about the thin-skinned former deputy counsel for the right-wing First Liberty Institute, an organization of like-minded lawyers that specializes in advancing the agenda of the Christian right. Trump’s role in judicial nominations was, by all appearances, simply a process of rubber-stamping whoever the society, under the auspices of its executive vice president Leonard Leo, deigned to tee up.
At Kacsmaryk’s June 2019 confirmation hearing, 52 Senate Republicans didn’t even flinch at that confirmation. This is someone who had smeared transgender individuals as “mentally disordered,” gays and lesbians as just generally “disordered,” and wrote disparagingly about how “elitist” sexual revolutionaries who he apparently despised had demanded “that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
At that time, Kacsmaryk’s impeccable forced-birth credentials were the only thing that mattered. Because that was a full three years before the U.S. Supreme Court—with a new conservative majority freshly seeded by the same Federalist Society—actually did exactly what Republicans had claimed they always wanted: It overruled Roe v. Wade. In a few short weeks, Republican-dominated legislatures throughout the country gleefully embarked on their crusade to turn women and pregnant people into second-class citizens.
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