In his whirlwind summer of accomplishments, one of President Joe Biden’s highlights may have been overshadowed by news of war, inflation, abortion rights battles and the FBI’s Mar-A-Lago investigation. Biden has appointed more federal court judges at this point in his term than any president since John F. Kennedy. As of Aug. 8, 2022, exactly 566 days into Biden’s term, the Senate had confirmed a record 75 Biden-appointed judges to federal courts, according to a count by the Pew Research Center. That’s more than Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush have secured so far in their presidencies, as well as other presidents since JFK, who remains the record holder for the fastest nominations at this point in the term them with 102. The total number of Biden Senate-confirmed judicial nominees was 78 as of Aug. 26, according to UScourts.gov. This includes appellate and district court judges, along with a High Court judge. Biden’s nominations also include a record number of women and racial and ethnic minorities. Most notably, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to be nominated and confirmed on a bipartisan vote for the Supreme Court. In early August, when the Senate confirmed Indian-American attorney Roopali Desai to serve as Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized the importance of her confirmation in creating a more diverse court. “Not too long ago, a nominee like Ms. Desai would have been rarely seen in the Senate, but under President Biden, the Senate is confirming more and more nominees who deviate from the norm: over 75% of President Biden’s nominees they’re women and almost half are women of color,” Schumer, D-New York, said on the Senate floor Aug. 4. Schumer, whose office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, continued: “Now people are saying, well, why shouldn’t it be the same percentage as the population? Well, that’s what we’re trying to get to, but we’re left way back and putting more women and people of color on the bench brings those rates a little closer to the American norm. But we have a ways to go.” Because of the nature and speed of judicial nominations, it’s often an achievement for presidents who fly under the radar. However, they have a large stake in creating a lasting and consequential legacy for presidents even after they leave office. For Biden, who has relied heavily on Schumer’s maneuvering to push through his agenda, his judicial achievements build on his summer victories that followed months of stubbornly unfavorable polls. Biden benefited from a 2019 rule change by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that cut the debate time for most judicial nominations from 30 to two hours. The decision by McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, to invoke the “nuclear option” allowed lawmakers to confirm a nominee with a simple majority, ultimately allowing multiple judicial vacancies to be filled in one day, according to the American Bar Association. Democrats who were in the minority at the time opposed the rule change, but now it has helped fast-track Biden’s nominations to lifetime justices. “The significance is that it’s one of the biggest legacies that he’s going to leave because these judges will be making decisions long after Joe Biden is gone, long after his administration is gone, it will still have the stamp of these judges on American politics.” Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program and director of the Center for Effective Public Administration at the Brookings Institution told Insider. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and President Joe Biden at the signing ceremony for the De-Inflation Act on August 16, 2020. Schumer has been key to Biden’s agenda, including speedy judicial confirmations. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
August of achievements
The Biden administration has been on a hot streak in recent weeks with a series of landmark legislative victories, including passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. Michael Kornfield, a political scientist and associate professor of political management at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, said Biden’s judicial achievements have been overlooked but are not the most important. “It’s certainly been overshadowed by the bigger stories in the news, but I wouldn’t count that as a major achievement of his presidency to date,” Cornfield said in an email to Insider. Instead, Cornfield argues that Biden’s legislative efforts are far more important than his court victories. “I would also rank these judicial appointments under his foreign policy achievements, notably rallying Europe to rally the US to arm Ukraine and end US military involvement in Afghanistan (as bad as the withdrawal),” Cornfield said. Still, Cornfield praises Biden for making more diverse appointments. “I think Biden deserves credit for appointing so many women and people of color to these positions, including, of course, Supreme Court Justice Jackson,” she said. According to Balls & Strikes, a nonprofit commentary organization funded by Demand Justice, a progressive advocacy organization focused on the justice system, 67.4% of Biden’s confirmed judicial nominees were people of color and 70.5% were women . Those numbers surpass both Trump — whose confirmed nominees were 16% people of color and 24% women — and Barack Obama at 36% people of color and 42% women. The difficult thing about analyzing the number of judicial nominations, Cornfield told Insider, is timing. “The problem with these kinds of statistics, in my opinion, is that they come at random times,” Cornfield wrote. “Let’s see where Biden ranks at the end of this Congress and at the end of his term.” The White House did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment on his court victories and what they mean for his legacy. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Both judges were nominated by Donald Trump during his presidency. Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images
Presidential legacy
Trump finished his four-year term in January 2021 with the second-fastest overall confirmation rate of any US president with 234 Article III judges and 54 Court of Appeals judges. Jimmy Carter holds the overall record for most federal court confirmations during a single presidency. Carter’s 266 appointments surpass George W. Bush’s 204 and Bill Clinton’s 203, according to the Article 3 project’s judicial tracker. Trump also managed to send three justices to the Supreme Court during his presidency — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — strengthening the court’s conservative leanings. With no term limits for federal judges or justices, carrying out the legacy of those who appointed them usually exceeds any president, no matter how many terms they sit in the Oval Office. On one side of Pennsylvania Avenue, Biden has Schumer. On the other hand, right inside his White House, said the Brookings Institution’s Kamarck, Chief of Staff Ron Klein played a key role in the rapid pace of judicial confirmations. Klein has decades of experience shepherding judicial candidates, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993, and as a seasoned White House and Senate aide. “The White House has clearly prioritized judicial appointments — as it should — because we’ve seen Republican White Houses do that in the past, and look what happened,” Kamarck said. “They have a Supreme Court that is certainly more conservative than the nation.” When asked about the significance of Biden’s different candidacies, Kamarck said that Biden is “just correcting a lot of past mistakes or past mistakes.” “Plus, it makes sure we have a judiciary that looks like the country as we move forward,” Kamarck told Insider. “So whether it’s women — lots of women or various different minorities — she wants to make sure she looks like the country and where the country is going.” …
