CNN
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President Joe Biden and leading Democratic lawmakers opposed a once broadly bipartisan bill that would create 63 new permanent judges, 22 of whom would be filled by President-elect Donald Trump. It became.
The White House said Tuesday that Biden has vetoed a bill that would have added judgeships to the nation’s most overburdened federal courts, which passed unanimously in the Senate this summer and is expected to be voted on in the House this week. announced that it would exercise the right.
Judges across the ideological spectrum have warned that a staffing shortage is severely holding up cases. The apparent collapse in support for legislation to address judicial shortages underscores how polarized the political environment surrounding the judiciary has become and the potential for President Trump to amplify the already significant influence he is already having on the court. It shows how the measures are considered detrimental to the judiciary. Democratic Party.
The Senate and outside supporters of the bill are hoping the House will take it up before the election, when neither party will first know which side will benefit from passing the bill. Ta. Democrats now cite the House Republican leadership’s failure to do so as the reason for their declining support.
“Under this bill, all of us would give the next three anonymous presidents a certain number of judges,” New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said Monday during a House hearing on the bill. I promised.” “We were all equally disadvantaged because no one knows what the future holds, but for this agreement to work, the bill needed to pass by Election Day.”
House Republicans said last month they intended to take up the bill no matter who won, but they said they couldn’t vote on it before the election because they needed work to introduce the bill and it had to pass in Congress. said. That too before the election.
California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the bill’s sponsor, said Tuesday that the bill is “a lasting solution to the nationwide judge shortage” and “is the result of years of hard work by national stakeholders.” It is an achievement.” It ultimately received “unanimous support from strong bipartisan majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives.”
“President Biden can veto this bill, but he cannot block consensus ideas whose time has come,” he said in a statement to CNN.
Judges (including in interviews with CNN) said the judiciary faces a staffing crisis that undermines litigants’ rights to speedy trials. The bill’s authors used recommendations from the Judicial Council, the judicial policy-making body, to determine which courts would be eligible under the bill, the Law Concerning Delays in Resolving Emergency Situations Due to Judicial Staff Shortages (Judges Law). It was decided whether to hire additional judges (all for the first instance).
Fix the Court, a judicial transparency group that often takes sides with Republicans on courtroom ethics issues, is calling on President Biden to reverse its opposition, and its executive director Gabe Ross has threatened to veto it. He called the threat a “slap in the face to the nation.” Face our overworked federal judges. ”
But the left-wing judicial advocacy group Alliance for Justice applauded Biden’s veto threat, saying, “We must seize every chance we have to protect our courts over the next four years.”
The Judicial Conference conducted a thorough analysis to compile the recommendations, while the bill’s authors used feedback from lawmakers to add additional judges to cover three different presidential terms and five Congresses. We have created a plan to phase in the implementation of these measures every 10 years. In some of the overburdened courts covered by the bill, criminal cases can take a median of years to resolve.
Still, while acknowledging the timing of the House vote after the election, the White House said in its announcement that the addition of justices was being done in a “hurried manner” and that the justices “are required to ensure the efficient and effective administration of the judiciary.” He argued that it was unnecessary.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech shortly before the White House’s announcement that “a lame-duck president would never consider vetoing such an obviously sensitive measure for any reason other than selfish malice.” It’s almost unthinkable.”
“Litigants across the country deserve their day in court,” McConnell said. “And they have a right to know that the federal judiciary has the leeway to carefully and thoroughly consider their cases.”
McConnell has led Republican efforts in the past to block Democratic nominees based on existing court vacancies, including blocking Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court nominee. The White House’s announcement Tuesday noted that some of the new vacancies created by the Judges Act are in states where “senators are seeking to fill existing judicial vacancies.”
“These efforts to preserve vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economics and caseloads are not the true driving force behind the passage of this bill at this time,” the White House said.
Lawmakers may try to pass the bill in the new Congress, but gaining Democratic support would require delaying the first placement of new justices until 2029, when control from the White House is unclear. There may be.
