Chicago – December 13, 2024
President Joe Biden and key Democrats have come out against a once broadly bipartisan bill that would create 63 new permanent judgeships now that President-elect Donald Trump would be the one to fill 22 of them.
The White House said Tuesday that Biden would veto the bill – passed unanimously by the Senate this summer and set for a House vote this week – that would add judgeships to the most overburdened federal courthouses in the country.
Judges across the ideological spectrum have warnedthat staffing shortages have created a major backlog in cases. The apparent collapse in support of legislation that would address the judicial shortfall shows how polarized the political environment around the judiciary has become has become, and how any measure that would expand the already-large imprint that Trump has made on the courts is deemed toxic to Democrats.
The bill’s Senate champions and outside supporters had hoped that the House would take up the bill before the election, when neither party would know which side would initially benefit from its passage. Democrats are now pointing to House GOP leadership’s failure to do so as reason why they’re reversing their support.
“Under this legislation, we all promised to give the next three unknown presidents a certain number of judges,” New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said at a House hearing on the bill Monday. “Because no one can tell the future we were all at an equal disadvantage, but for this deal to work, the bill had to be passed before Election Day.”
House Republicans have said they would have taken up the bill regardless of who won last month, and that they were unable to vote on it before the election because work needed to be done for it and because of the must-pass legislation that was before Congress before the election as well.
