 | | Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division |
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President Biden today announced the first 11 judicial nominees of his term, a diverse list of names that he framed as a first step toward neutralizing the impact of his predecessor's push to move the federal bench decidedly rightward. |
Biden has already issued a slew of executive orders and enacted legislation seeking to turn back many of President Donald Trump's conservative policies, but there may be no area in which Trump had a stronger effect than the courts. |
Trump installed almost as many federal judges in four years as President Barack Obama had in his eight-year tenure. By the time he left office, Trump's appointees accounted for nearly three out of every 10 judges on the federal bench. |
Working closely with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the Republican majority leader, Trump also emphasized appointments to appeals courts, rather than lower-status district courts. He installed 54 judges in the appeals courts in four years, while Obama seated just one more than that across eight years. Nearly one-quarter of Trump's appointees were appeals-court judges, a greater share than for any other recent president, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. |
Trump's appointees were overwhelmingly white and male, and they skewed markedly young, part of his and McConnell's strategy to leave a lasting imprint on the federal judicial system. Five out of six judges appointed by Trump were white, a higher rate than any president since George H.W. Bush. Three out of four were men. |
"In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, Trump stood out in the sense that his appointees were overwhelmingly male and white," John Gramlich, a senior writer at Pew who has conducted research into the impact of Trump's appointments, said in an interview. |
On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court if he got the chance. His first round of nominees at the appeals and district levels reflects a similar commitment; none are white men. And the commitment to diversity extends into their professional backgrounds: While Trump's nominees were mostly prosecutors and corporate law partners, Biden has chosen a slate of lawyers and judges whose careers include civil rights litigation, public service and criminal defense. |
Among the more consequential positions he has filled is at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. Biden named Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder who previously represented hundreds of indigent clients as a federal public defender. If confirmed by the Senate, she would become the only Black jurist on the influential Seventh Circuit Court, after Trump passed up four opportunities to install a nonwhite judge to the court. |
 | | The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division |
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Biden also announced that he would seek to elevate Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is currently a district-court judge, to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She too has worked as a public defender, and has served as a Supreme Court clerk and later a corporate litigator. |
In a statement released this morning, the White House emphasized the speed of its nominations, pointing out that no administration had named as many judicial nominees so early in its first term. "President Biden has had a career-long commitment to the strength of the federal judiciary, and that is reflected in the historically fast pace at which he has moved to fill vacancies on the federal bench," the statement said. |
But confirming the nominees will not necessarily be a painless task, as Democrats control only 50 seats in the Senate. "It's pretty much the barest majority for them to get any nominations through," Gramlich said. "Two years from now, if Republicans take back the Senate, it would become much more difficult for Biden." |
For now, the Democrats have one big advantage — courtesy of former Senator Harry Reid. As the Democratic majority leader for part of Obama's presidency, Reid disallowed the filibuster on judicial appointments (while keeping it for votes on legislation), making it easier for the president to get his appointees confirmed. |
When Trump became president, McConnell — who had little appetite for passing major legislation, but was keenly focused on the federal bench — took full advantage of his former foe's maneuver. Now, with Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York in the cockpit, Democrats are aiming to take back as much ground as they can. |
Civil rights groups sue Georgia over its restrictive new voting law. |
A coalition of civil rights groups led by the N.A.A.C.P. has filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia officials arguing that a new law severely curtailing voting access represents "intentional discrimination" against the state's Black voters. |
The suit, dated March 28 and filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, is the third case brought since Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed a G.O.P.-backed bill that drastically limits the use of drop boxes, requires proof of identity for absentee voting, and makes it a crime to provide food or water to voters forced to line up outside of polling locations. |
Opponents of the bill are mounting an all-fronts battle to roll back the law and others like it, state by state — as Senate Democrats debate scrapping or suspending the filibuster rule to pass two sweeping electoral overhaul bills that would void state-level restrictions. |
Civil rights groups and progressive activists are looking increasingly to the courts as the best chance to stop the voting restrictions that Republican-controlled legislatures in many states are considering or passing. |
The law "is the culmination of a concerted effort to suppress the participation of Black voters and other voters of color by the Republican State Senate, State House, and governor," wrote the lawyers from the Georgia chapters of the N.A.A.C.P. and several other groups, including the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda. |
The plaintiffs argue that Kemp and other Republicans violated the First, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by seeking to limit the participation of Democratic voters, who are a growing force in the state's urban and suburban areas. |
"Unable to stem the tide of these demographic changes or change the voting patterns of voters of color, these officials have resorted to attempting to suppress the vote of Black voters and other voters of color in order to maintain the tenuous hold that the Republican Party has in Georgia," they added. "In other words, these officials are using racial discrimination as a means of achieving a partisan end." |
The plaintiffs claim that "detailed records" on "the racial demographics of voting" maintained by his office were used to draft the legislation. |
"As a result, the Georgia legislators and its elected officials are well aware of the implications of making decisions as to voting on racial and ethnic minorities," they wrote. |
The coalition, which includes Georgia's Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe in the southern part of the state, also argues that the targeting of early in-person voting, absentee ballots and drop boxes discriminates against "Black, Latinx, Asian-American, members of Indigenous populations." |
Similar suits, making nearly identical legal arguments, were filed by Marc Elias, a top Democratic elections lawyer, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, a civil rights group, shortly after Kemp signed the law on March 25. |
Republicans in Georgia and several other states considering similar laws have argued that restrictions are needed to address claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 elections, even though election officials in the state have repeatedly reported that there were few, if any, instances of fraud in last year's balloting. |
This piece comes from our live briefing, where you can find more updates on the news in Washington today. |
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