Savannah Hulsey Pointer, FISM News
President Joe Biden’s 40th judicial nominee was confirmed on Saturday, tying the current president with Ronald Reagan for the number of judges nominated and confirmed during a president’s first year in the White House.
According to a report by WDC News 6, Biden’s volume of confirmations was aided by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has frequently cast a tiebreaking confirmation vote in the evenly divided Senate. However, the president’s judicial agenda was not without challenges.
Wins for the White House came in spades for the states that were represented by two Democratic senators but had a little more trouble in states with one senator apiece from the two primary parties. In some cases, such as in Tennessee, Republicans raised objections to the president’s picks for their courts.
The Volunteer State’s two Republican senators have called out Biden over his picks for their influential court of appeals, indicating they don’t believe the nominations Biden has reflect the values of Tennesseans.
InSize reported that lawmakers confirmed 10 district judges before leaving for the holidays in a pre-dawn rush Saturday morning to end business. This was reportedly a big win for Democrats who considered the Trump administration’s movements to be focused on reshaping the judiciary in a manner disagreeable to Democrats.
According to the publication, the Senate confirmed 18 circuit and district court judges in President Donald J. Trump’s first year in office, and 12 in President Barack Obama’s inaugural year. Biden, who was a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pledged to counteract the former president’s judicial agenda.
The pointedly “diverse” group of judges put before the Senate committee included the first Muslim American federal judge and the first openly lesbian judge to serve on any federal circuit court.
“Because of the commitment to restoring the federal judiciary by President Biden and Senate Democrats,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said, “it is no longer a bench that is simply prosecutors, partners in large law firms — but rather many, many others from walks of life with different and needed perspectives on the federal bench, such as public defenders, civil rights lawyers, election experts and more.”
The administration, however, faces the possibility that they could lose control of the Senate in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, and it’s been noted that if that were to be the case, Trump’s record of 34 circuit court judges in four years might be difficult to beat.
“So far, the percentage of Republican appointees on the court of appeals is almost unchanged from when Biden took office,” said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the federal court. “If Biden loses the Senate, it’s not going to be talking about ‘How many appointees,’” Mr. Wheeler said. “It’s going to be talking about whether there’s going to be any at all.”
In addition to the judges passing the Senate with approval on Saturday, 41 ambassadors were given the stamp of approval by the upper chamber of Congress.