Diverse judicial slate shows Biden can deliver
Republicans long have understood that appointing judges quickly is essential to retaining power, even when their party is not in the White House or controlling Congress. GOP voters, in particular, have supported candidates who promised conservative judges who would vote to overturn abortion.
That’s why many voters continued to embrace former President Donald Trump, with all his flaws. Trump gave them the judges they wanted, including three Supreme Court justices.
By the time he left office, he had appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench — including almost as many federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight. He replaced 25 percent of the federal bench and 30 percent of the circuit court bench, a legacy that will last.
Trump reshaped the federal judiciary, working with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, to move appointments along and relying on the conservative Federalist Society to find candidates with the right background: conservative, pro-business, anti-abortion rights and promoting so-called religious liberty.
For the foreseeable future, these judges will decide cases that determine LBGTQ rights, workers’ rights, environmental protections and how the nation votes.
Democrats finally understand that after winning the presidency and gaining a slim majority in the Senate, they cannot sit on judicial appointments.
This week President Joe Biden revealed his hand — announcing 11 nominations to various federal courts, including one in New Mexico: Las Cruces lawyer and former public defender Margaret Strickland for the U.S. District Court.
The slate is diverse, in sharp contrast to Trump appointees who were mostly white and male. It is an unmistakable sign that Biden will do his best to make his mark on the judiciary.
The midterm election, after all, is in 2022. A majority, especially one held by a single vote, can be fleeting. Biden and Democrats must move quickly.
Biden’s approach to the nominations steals a page from the conservative Federalist Society, according to court expert and journalist Dahlia Lithwick.
“It’s amply clear that Biden’s judge-picking machine has learned some important lessons from the Federalist Society’s stranglehold on judicial selection,” Lithwick wrote in Slate, a progressive online magazine. “The game has now changed for both sides.”
Among the 11 nominees are nine women and nine people of color. The old saw that “qualified” minorities are impossible to find obviously is false. Diversity is about more than race or gender, though. The nominees have a more varied background, not simply former prosecutors or corporate lawyers. There are former public defenders and civil rights lawyers. They are young, meaning the impact of these appointments can last for decades.
The nominees include Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit, plus what would be the first Muslim American federal judge, Zahid Quraishi, and Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, a former longtime federal public defender, to serve on what is now the all-white 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.
Biden promised to bring forward the names of experienced, qualified and, yes, diverse candidates to serve on the federal bench. Now, it’s up to Democrats in the Senate to get to work — weekends if necessary — if they plan to keep Trump’s judicial legacy from taking root.