Cheers to new batch of federal judges

President Joe Biden’s first year in office has been an abject failure no matter how you slice it. There was no other rational takeaway for anyone following the talk from grousing congressional Democrats and top news media analysts and commentators Monday, the day after it became clear that the party’s $2 trillion social spending and climate-action bill would not become law.

But before just mindlessly nodding along and joining the chorus of doomsayers, it’s important to note a few of the president’s domestic policy accomplishments. Straight out of the gate, Democrats passed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief effort. Later, with support from Republicans, they assembled and passed into law a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The former likely kept the nation from sinking into a deep recession, and the latter will improve people’s lives for years to come.

But that’s not all. In his first year in the White House, Biden got 40 federal judges confirmed by the Senate. That’s the most in four decades.

By way of comparison, in 2017, his first year in office, President Donald Trump had 18 federal judges confirmed by the Senate, and President Barack Obama got just a dozen federal judges seated during his first year in office.

But the top-line number tells only a part of the story. Because the times have changed, and Biden has been working to see that the federal judiciary is changing, too. Consider just one number: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, he also saw 40 federal judges confirmed. Just three of them were women. Fully 30 of Biden’s 40 appointees are women.

Here was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a written statement: “These judges will bring sorely needed diversity to the judiciary: not just demographic diversity, but also professional diversity, adding to the breadth and width and depth of knowledge possessed by the courts.”

Hear, hear.

Biden’s successes in populating the federal courts with his judicial nominees won’t generate a ton of positive publicity for the president. Certainly not with so much focus on the failure of the White House to get its so-called Build Back Better bill passed into law. But no one should think that the raft of new judges is anything less than a truly significant accomplishment.