During Joe Biden’s four years as president, he and Senate Democrats prioritized diversity at an unprecedented level for nominees to the federal judiciary, making a lasting mark on the nation’s courts, 19th News reports. in a story that charts the differences between the administrations' nominees. In 2021, Biden entered office in 2021 focused on judicial appointments after President Donald Trump reached a record of 234 judicial confirmations in four years. Ultimately, Biden surpassed this record by one. Biden also appointed more women than any other president, along with the largest number of LGBTQ+ judges, the most Black women and the most women of color of any president. Of his 235 judicial confirmations, more than 60% were women. The largest share — 37% — were women of color, 26% were white women, 22 percent were men of color and 15% were white men. Beyond racial diversity, nearly 100 of the confirmed judges nominated by Biden have worked as civil rights lawyers or public defenders, adding professional diversity to the pipeline that is often overlooked.
By contrast, Trump, who overwhelmingly appointed white men during his first term: white men represented 64% of the judicial confirmations. White women made up 19% men of color were 11% and women of color were 5% of Trump’s judicial confirmations. That reverses the trajectories or his Republican predecessors, said Stacy Hawkins, a professor with Rutgers Law School. Historically, Republican presidents “have made the judiciary more diverse than their Republican predecessors, and Democrats made it more diverse than their Democratic predecessors." But Trump disrupted that trend. “I think given this strident rhetoric of anti-DEI that now pervades the Republican Party, it will be interesting to see whether or not Trump actually fails to even succeed his own past poor record,” Hawkins said. During Trump’s first term in office he had the ability to make a number of appellate courts more conservative. On the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which has been described as the most conservative court in the nation,12 of its 17 active judges have been selected by Republican presidents — six of them by Trump.
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