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One of Donald Trump’s top achievements during his first term as president was confirming federal judges – reshaping the courts with conservative jurists for decades to come.
Now, with just weeks to go before they lose power in Washington following the outcome of the November election, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Democratic colleagues are rushing to finalize a judicial counterbalance.
“While Democrats still hold the majority, we’re going to do everything we can to confirm as many judges as we can,” Schumer said recently, amid a flurry of votes and dealmaking to get confirmations through the Senate.
Trump did better than his recent predecessors in filling vacant federal judgeships, getting 234 of his judicial nominees confirmed.
By comparison, President Joe Biden, with the help of Schumer and Senate Democrats, is set to match or possibly exceed that total. As of Dec. 10, they had confirmed 232 judicial nominees.
And the new appointees are highly diverse.
More than 60 percent of the judges confirmed by the Senate so far during the Biden years have been women. Nearly 60 percent are people of color.
In addition to the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, the cohort of new judges includes the first Muslim American man and woman on the federal bench, the first out lesbian on a federal circuit court, and the first Navajo federal judge, according to Schumer’s office.
The Senate has also broken some records, including confirming more women of color and openly LGBTQ+ people to judgeships than during any other president’s full time in office, according to Schumer’s team.
“We’ve seen record numbers of former public defenders, civil rights lawyers, labor lawyers – the kinds of people who never really had a shot, even under prior Democratic administrations,” said John Collins, Jr., an associate professor at The George Washington University Law School.
“That’s a big deal. It brings new perspectives, a new view of the law,” he continued.
Biden and Senate Democrats have so far outpaced Trump in getting new district court judges confirmed, while falling short of Trump on court of appeals confirmations, according to data from Schumer’s office.
The impact these judges will have on the future of jurisprudence is less clear. Unlike Trump, Biden did not have a chance to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court, so conservatives can still wield a healthy majority on the most high-profile cases nationally.
“But for most people, when they file a lawsuit, they’re looking to get justice in front of the trial judge,” Collins said. “I think that the Biden administration has done a great job rebalancing the trial courts.”
Of course, with Trump now about to return to the White House, he will get a second bite at the judicial apple.
