President Biden left his mark on the federal judiciary by installing a large number of appointees from diverse backgrounds, but he made few inroads on changing the ideological balance of courts that Donald Trump made more conservative during his first term. Trump’s return to office could ensure that the federal courts lean solidly in a conservative direction for years to come, reports the Wall Street Journal. In raw numbers, as far of judges confirmed, Biden edged Trump’s first term by a nose, appointing 235 judges to Trump’s 234. But the Democrat had few pivotal appointments, appointing only one Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and installing nine fewer judges than Trump to the powerful U.S. courts of appeals, which sit one level below the high court. Also, many of Biden’s appointees to those courts succeeded other like-minded judges, meaning that the overall ideological dynamics didn’t change much.
Biden did make a lasting impact in appointing judges that represent a broader swath of America. About 60% of the judges he installed were people of color, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. And more than 60% were women. Biden said in December that he appointed more Black women to the courts of appeals than all other previous administrations combined. He also appointed the first openly LGBTQ woman to the appeals courts, as well as the first Muslim-American to a life-tenured judicial post.
Another Biden priority was selecting nominees with a broader array of professional experience, including by appointing former federal public defenders to a judiciary that has been disproportionately represented by former prosecutors. That focus resulted in a new batch of judges who are distinctly different “in terms of the types of clients they’ve represented and the cases they have been exposed to,” said retired federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who now directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute, a center at the UC Berkeley School of Law. In recent weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to confirm as many Biden judicial nominees as possible, Republicans stalled; the two sides reached a compromise deal in which Democrats agreed to give up on confirming four remaining appeals-court nominees in exchange for Republicans removing road blocks on nominees for the U.S. district courts, the trial-level courts in the federal system.
Comments