Reagan-appointed judge torches colleagues in Texas map fight: calls ruling ‘fiction,’ ‘judicial activism’

A federal judge in Texas responded to the court’s decision to scrap the state’s redrawn map with a jaw-dropping dissent on Wednesday in which he lobbed dozens of insults at his colleague and repeatedly invoked Democratic mega-donor George Soros."This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed," Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan-appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, wrote of the 2-1 decision to toss out the map.In the turbulent 104-page tirade, he named the majority opinion's author, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, hundreds