Republicans refuse to add judges under veil of electoral ignorance, pretend to be surprised that Democrats withdraw their agreement
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Jonathan Adler — with unhappiness reflected in the subhead “It is apparently unacceptable that some of the new judges would be appointed by a Republican” — objects to Biden vetoing a bill to create more District Court judgeships:
Yesterday the White House issued a statement by President Biden indicating he is vetoing the JUDGES Act, bipartisan legislation to create additional district court judgeships.
The Senate passed the bill unanimously in August, and a bipartisan House majority followed suit shortly after the election. It would have created 66 new district court seats over the next decade. The bill is based upon the recommendations of the Judicial Conference and was endorsed by the Federal Bar Association and Federal Judges Association. Even Fix the Court liked it, calling the veto threat “weird.”
The reason for the veto — and it says something about the limitations of legal liberalism that Fix the Court doesn’t understand the shot here — can be discerned easily if you go back to the chain of events:
The Senate passed the bill unanimously in August, and a bipartisan House majority followed suit shortly after the election.
The “bipartisan” label on the House vote is pretty misleading — there were 2 Republican nay votes and 29 Democratic yeas, it was basically a party line vote. And what’s going on here is obvious. Democrats were willing to add more District Court judgeships without knowing who would win the next election. House Republicans were only willing to add them after knowing that 1)Trump had won, and 2)Republicans had secured a comfortable Senate majority. Of course Biden is going to veto the bill under those circumstances! Republicans could have gotten more District Court judgeships that would either be filled by Trump or even if any were confirmed under Harris would be supervised by a Supreme Court supermajority, and Trump was favored to win. But even that wasn’t enough — Republicans wanted it all, so they got nothing, and it’s nice to see some Democratic pushback for once.
The Fix the Courts critique of Biden is also willfully naive in a couple of other ways. First, its assumption that Senate Republicans would respect Democratic blue slips is…come on. And second, while I agree that Dems should probably be favored to win the presidential election in 2028 — significant because the judgeships would be staggered — Dems would not be favored to have a Senate majority, making even District Court judgeships opening up during a Democratic administration of very limited value.
The fact that too many liberals in the legal world are playing checkers while the Federalist Society checkmates the judiciary is a serious ongoing problem.