With just over two weeks until he cedes the reins of the executive branch to Donald Trump, President Joe Biden says the 235 judges confirmed to the federal bench during his four years in office will serve as a bulwark against abuses from the executive and legislative branches and will represent what he described as “the best in America.”
Joined by Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin of Illinois and Senate Majority Leader — soon to be Minority Leader — Chuck Schumer of New York, Biden spoke of the record number of judicial confirmations at an East Room ceremony attended by staff and supporters to mark the milestone, which the Democratic-led upper chamber reached late last month before recessing and ending legislative work for the year.
The 235 judges, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the highest court in the land, are the most confirmed during any four-year presidential term since Jimmy Carter served as president from 1977 to 1981. The total confirmed to the bench under Biden is just one judge more than the number confirmed by a Republican senate majority during Trump’s first term.
Unlike Trump’s overwhelmingly white and male nominees, the Biden administration has taken pains to increase the number of non-white, female and LGBT+ nominees to the federal bench during his time in office. A fact sheet release by the White House on Thursday described his nominees as having “transformed the federal bench” by making up over a quarter of all active federal judges who make the judiciary “look like the community it serves.”
Speaking from the East Room not long after he was briefed on the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans, Biden described them as “highly qualified people” who’ve had “distinguished legal, judicial and academic careers.”
He said their backgrounds matter because judges spend their days “shaping the everyday lives of Americans, protecting our basic freedoms” at a time when he described American institutions as being in jeopardy.
“These judges will be independent, they’ll be fair, and they’ll be impartial. All these appointees understand the role of a judge and are committed to the rule of law, the institutional safeguards building our constitution that upholds the rights and guarantees of the Constitution,” he said.
“These judges also are a vital check in the excesses of other branches of government, including Congress and the executive branch, when they overreach and run afoul of the constitutional institutional safeguards,” Biden continued before adding that he was “proud of the legacy” he will leave in the form of the judges he’s put on the bench because they will “continue to uphold our nation’s founding principles of liberty, justice, equality, and do it for decades to come.”
