The link is to the House Judiciary Committee bill markup calendar. In particular, I am concerned with H.R. 6755, H.R. 3487, H.R. 6754 and H.R. 6730 for purposes of this thread.
Let’s start with the last first. H.R. 6730, the Injunctive Authority Clarification Act of 2018. This bill would limit injunctive relief to the parties to the case at hand and would forbid injunctive relief from restraining non-parties to the litigation. Simply put, this is intended to restrain district courts from issuing sweeping nationwide injunctions I support this as I believe the nationwide injunction, which is a VERY recent phenonem, is being abused and is harmful to the orderly development of case law in the lower courts. Ironically, the Supreme Court may be poised to ban nationwide injunctions during the upcoming term.
H.R. 3487, entitled “To amend section 1332 of title 28, United States Code, to provide that the requirement for diversity of citizenship jurisdiction is met if any one party to the case is diverse in citizenship from any one adverse party in the case.” Currently, all parties in a case must be COMPLETELY diverse to invoke Federal diversity jurisdiction. Thus, Plaintiffs and Defendents in a case cannot overlap in any State or diversity jurisdiction is defeated. This legislation would change the law to require so called “minimal” diversity. If any Plaintiff or any Defendent are in a State separate from any of the opposing parties, diversity jurisdiction would apply. I oppose this as an unwarranted expansion of Federal jurisdiction and in any event, the Federal Courts are already overloaded, the last thing they need is more diversity cases.
H.R. 6755, the Judiciary ROOM Act. This bill simply provides the new judgeships as requested by the United States Judicial Conference in their 2017 report. I support this bill, with just ONE caveat. That being that the judgeships will not become effective until noon on January 20th, 2021.
H.R. 6754, the CIRCUIT Act. This bill purports to split the Ninth Circuit into three divisions, plus a Circuit division. There is too much wrong with this scheme to even bother discussing it. I do support splitting the Ninth Circuit, but it should be a full fledged Circuit split, done in the traditional manner as was done with the 8th Circuit in the 1920’s and the 5th Circuit in the early 1980’s.
