CNN
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President Joe Biden and top Democrats have come out against a once largely bipartisan bill that would create 63 new permanent judge positions, now that President-elect Donald Trump would be the one to fill 22.
The White House said Tuesday that Biden would veto the bill — passed unanimously by the Senate this summer and put to a vote in the House this week — which would add judgeships to the nation’s most overburdened federal courthouses.
Judges across the ideological spectrum have warned that the lack of staff has created a significant backlog in files. The apparent collapse of support for legislation that would address the judicial deficit shows how polarized the political environment around the judiciary has become and how any measure that would expand the already significant imprint that Trump has left on the courts is seen as toxic for Democrats.
Defenders of the bill in the Senate and outside supporters had hoped the House would pass the bill before the election, when neither party would know which side would initially benefit from its passage. Democrats are now pointing to the failure of Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to do so to explain why they are reversing their support.
“Under this legislation, we all promised to give the next three unknown presidents a certain number of justices,” New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said at a hearing Monday. in the House on the bill. “Because no one can predict the future, we were all equally disadvantaged, but for this deal to work, the bill had to pass before Election Day. »
House Republicans said they would have passed the bill regardless of who won last month, and were unable to vote on it before the election because there was still work to do and because of mandatory legislation submitted to Congress. also before the elections.
Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican who spearheaded the legislation, said Tuesday that the legislation was a “sustainable solution to a national shortage of judges” and was the product of the “work of a national set of stakeholders over several years, ultimately winning “the support of a unanimous Senate and a strong bipartisan majority in the House.”
“The Biden White House can veto this bill, but it cannot stop a consensus idea whose time has come,” he said in a statement to CNN.
Judges – including in interviews with CNN – said the justice system was facing a staffing crisis that was undermining the right of litigants to speedy justice. The architects of the bill used recommendations from the Judicial Conference, the decision-making body of the judiciary, to decide which courthouses would receive additional judges – all for trial courts – under the bill, the “Law on delays in matters of judicial understaffing to resolve emergencies” or JUDGES Law.
Fix the Court, a judicial transparency organization that is often on the opposing side of Republicans on issues related to court ethics, is calling on the Biden White House to reverse its opposition, with its executive director Gabe Roth calling the veto threat a “slap on the back”. in the face of our overworked federal judges.
However, the Alliance for Justice, a left-leaning legal advocacy organization, welcomed Biden’s veto threat, arguing that “every opportunity to protect our courts over the next four years must be taken.”
The Judicial Conference undertook a meticulous analysis to formulate its recommendations, while the bill’s authors used feedback from lawmakers to craft the 10-year deployment of the additional judges, to cover three different presidential terms and five Congresses. In some of the overburdened courthouses targeted by the legislation, resolving a median criminal case can take years.
Yet the White House, while also acknowledging the post-election timing of the House vote, claimed in its announcement that the justices were added “in haste” and were “unnecessary to the effective administration and efficiency of justice.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech shortly before the White House announcement that it was “almost inconceivable that a lame-duck president would consider vetoing such an obviously prudent measure for any reason other than selfish malice.”
“Litigants across America deserve their trial,” McConnell said. “And they deserve to know that the federal court system has the bandwidth to review their cases carefully and thoroughly.” »
McConnell has led Republican efforts in the past to block Democratic nominees for court vacancies, including blocking President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Tuesday’s White House announcement said some of the new openings the JUDGES Act would create would be in states “where senators have sought to keep existing judicial positions open.”
“These efforts to keep vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economics and workload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” the White House said.
Lawmakers could try to pass the bill in the new Congress, but winning Democratic support may require delaying the first assignment of the new justices until 2029, when White House control no longer takes place. will be better known.