WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden has two seats to hold influential court in the country’s capital which regularly feeds judges to the Supreme Court.
They are among about 10% of federal magistrates who will be or will be open soon, giving Biden his first chance to leave his mark on American justice.
Except for an unlikely expansion of the Supreme Court, Biden will be unable to do anything about the consolidated conservative majority in the high court soon. Judge Clarence Thomas, 72, is the oldest of the court’s conservatives and the three nominees for former President Donald Trump, aged 49 to 56, are expected to be on the bench for decades.
Democrats have traditionally not turned justice into a focus, but that is changing after four years of Trump and the big changes he made. Biden’s appointments are also the only concrete moves he has right now to affect the judiciary, although there is talk of expanding the number of judges in lower courts.
The nearly 90 seats Biden can hold, giving life to its occupants after Senate confirmation, are fewer than those inherited by the former Trump four years ago. This is because Republicans who controlled the Senate in the last two years of Obama’s White House confirmed relatively few judges.
Included in the count are 10 seats in federal appeals courts where almost all appeals, other than the few dozen that the Supreme Court decides each year, end.
Merrick Garland is occupying a seat, confirmation of which as Attorney General is expected in the coming days. Another court judge, David Tatel, has said he is downsizing, a change that allows Biden to appoint his successor.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas were appellate judges in the court at the bottom of Capitol Hill before joining the upper court at the top of the hill.
The late magistrates Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also acted in the appellate court, where they first formed their lasting friendship.
After Scalia’s death just over five years ago. President Barack Obama nominated Garland on the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans did not even give him a hearing, let alone a vote.
When Trump took office in January 2017, he had a vacancy in the high court to fill. Trump ended up making three Supreme Court appointments to go along with 54 appeals from the appellate courts and 174 trial judges, aided by the determination of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to him. same, “leave no vacancy.”
Democrats and their progressive allies say they have learned a lesson or two from Republicans and want judicial candidacies to be a bigger focus than in previous Democratic administrations.
“It’s an exceptional situation where you have a president and the people around him, people who really see this as a priority,” said former Wisconsin Democrat Sen. Russ Feingold who served with Biden in the Senate for 16 years. Feingold is now president of the American Constitution Society.
“I think President Biden knows that part of his legacy will be to undo the damage caused by Trump as much as possible,” Feingold said.
So far, liberal groups are encouraged by the signals sent by the White House. White House attorney Dana Remus wrote to senators in December that recommendations for new judges should be filed within 45 days of the vacancy.
Biden has already pledged to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if a seat is opened. Judge Stephen Breyer, 82, is the oldest member of the court and could retire, but has not announced any plans.
Democrats are looking for various types of diversity, after the Trump years in which more than 75% of judicial candidates were men and 85% were white.
In addition to race and gender, liberal groups are committed to the diversity of experiences so that they are considered public defenders and public interest advocates along with lawyers and prosecutors from large law firms that have predominated in recent administrations.
“Our view is that we would like to see how they prioritize experiential diversity, which would be new and different from the two previous Democratic administrations,” said Nan Aron, president of the Liberal Alliance for Justice, referring to the presidencies of Obama and Clinton.
So far, judges who have announced that they are retiring or moving to a senior staff, the term to reduce the workload, have been primarily appointed for Democratic presidents. Some seem to have postponed retirement until Trump left the White House.
An additional four dozen or so are eligible for staffing or will be before Biden’s term ends in 2025. These judges must be at least 65 years old and have 15 years of service in the bank.
But Democrats are also contemplating a major expansion of the judiciary for the first time in 30 years. The creation of new judicial charges to deal with an increase in the number of cases in some parts of the country could attract bipartisan support, although it could provide a good number of judicial appointments for Biden in the short term.
Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo recently wrote about the need for another federal judge for his state, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, supports the incorporation of judges in California and other states.
“There is broad agreement here on the platforms of both parties,” Issa said last month during a hearing of the House Judicial Subcommittee on Judicial Extension.
But some Republicans and conservative groups are wary of what Democrats might try to do now that they control Congress and the White House. If Democrats conclude that “the courts are somehow safe and create judges to fill them to distort the courts, I don’t agree with that,” said John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, who helped compile a list of possible Supreme Court nominees for Trump.
At the same hearing, Rep. Steve Chabot, of R-Ohio, said Democrats controlled the House in the last two years of Trump’s term, but did not hold a hearing and did not propose any expansion legislation. “I wonder why?” he asked.