Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

‘Partisan Politics At Its Worst’: Biden Fuels ‘Judicial Crisis’ By Vetoing Bill That Would Let Trump Tap New Judges

Screen Capture/Supreme Court of the United States

President Joe Biden vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have created new judgeships during future presidential administrations Monday night, barring President-elect Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a maximum of 22 new federal district court judges during his second term.

Biden cited House GOP leadership’s decision to delay taking up the legislation until after the election and concerns regarding the motivations behind Republican lawmakers’ support for the bill as his rationale for opposing an expansion of the country’s federal judicial branch, according to a veto statement published on Monday.

“S. 4199 would create new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies,” Biden wrote in a statement. “Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now.”

Republican Indiana Sen. Todd Young, the primary sponsor of the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved (JUDGES) Act of 2024, torched the Biden administration’s veto announcement in a thread on X on Monday night.

“This decision is just another example of why Americans are counting down the days until President Biden leaves the White House,” Young wrote on X. “Issuing this veto is partisan politics at its worst. The JUDGES Act is a fair bill with strong bipartisan support that would have created 66 judgeships over three presidential terms to address our judicial backlog.”

“The President is more enthusiastic about using his office to provide relief to his family members who received due process than he is about giving relief to the millions of regular Americans who are waiting years for their due process,” Young added. “Biden’s legacy will be ‘pardons for me, no justice for thee.’”

The JUDGES Act of 2024 garnered widespread bipartisan support with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers recognizing the need to authorize new federal district court judgeships to aid overworked judges struggling to keep up with population growth and an increasing number of case filings in certain regions across the country.

The bill would have allowed Trump to nominate up to 22 new federal district court judges during the next four years and allow for a series of 10 to 11 new judges to be appointed by succeeding presidents every two years until 2035, according to a summary of the legislation from Young. The last time Congress updated the number of federal district court judgeships was 1990.

The bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent in August and won the support of 29 Democratic lawmakers in the House following Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s decision to take up the legislation on Dec. 12.

Notable Biden allies, including Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, voiced support for the legislation earlier this year.

Coons, an original co-sponsor of the federal judicial branch expansion legislation with Young, lamented Biden’s decision to veto the bill on Monday night.

“I understand that the president’s view is that to pass it this late in the session and hand the next president 22 judges to confirm is something he doesn’t support,” Coons told POLITICO. “If we could change the date by four years, I know — he told me — if we could change the date, he’d sign it tomorrow.”

Coons previously touted the bill’s unanimous passage out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in June.

“I’m delighted that the Senate Judiciary Committee has gotten serious about the crisis facing overworked judges across the country today by taking up and advancing my bipartisan JUDGES Act to the Senate floor,” said Coons. “For too long, Congress has failed to add new federal judgeships to keep pace with the rising caseloads around the country, and our nation’s federal courts – especially in Delaware, where there are only four active judgeships – have paid the price.”

More than 300 federal judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican administrations called for the passage of the JUDGES Act, according to an op-ed Young wrote for the Washington Post on Dec. 12 advocating for Biden to sign the bill into law following the president’s veto warning.

“Biden once again has the opportunity to join Congress in resolving a judicial crisis by signing into law the Judges Act: bipartisan legislation I introduced to increase the number of federal district court judges in the most overworked regions of the country,” Young wrote in the op-ed. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are forced to wait years for their federal cases to be heard. Many litigants feel their only option is to settle cases for suboptimal outcomes to provide some certainty. Our justice system is collapsing under the weight of caseloads: Overworked judges are retiring, and the staggering burden discourages high-quality candidates from pursuing the federal judiciary.”

GOP lawmakers will likely try to pass similar legislation in the next Congress with Trump in the Oval Office and Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

On Friday, Biden celebrated the Senate confirming 235 federal judges during his presidency. It marks the largest number of federal judge confirmations secured during a single presidential term since the 1980s, according to Biden’s statement.