Biden’s judicial appointments most diverse, report shows
President Joe Biden is adding diversity to the federal bench at unprecedented levels, according to a report released Tuesday — about two-thirds of his judicial appointees have been women, and two-thirds have been racial or ethnic minorities.
Of the 145 federal judges nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate as of Nov. 5, 95 have been female and 96 have been Black, Latino, Asian, Native American or multiracial, the Pew Research Center said. They include Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court’s first Black female justice, who was appointed to a federal appeals court by Biden in June 2021 and elevated to the high court a year later.
Among President Donald Trump’s 153 judicial appointees, women made up 24% and minorities 14%, the report said. President Barack Obama’s appointments were more diverse, 47% female and 37% minorities. The totals were 20% women and 17% minorities for President George W. Bush, 30% women and 29% minorities for President Bill Clinton, 13% women and 10% minorities for President George H.W. Bush, and 7% women and 5% minorities for President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s appointees included Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s first female justice, who died Friday at age 93. Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees included Amy Coney Barrett, the court’s fifth female justice.
Biden also appointed the San Francisco federal court’s first openly gay judge, P. Casey Pitts, formerly an attorney for workers and labor unions, who was confirmed by the Senate on a largely party-line vote in June.
Overall, the federal bench has become somewhat more diverse in recent years — about 33% of current federal judges are nonwhite, and 39% are female — but as the report indicated, changing the makeup of the judiciary was not on the presidential radar until civil rights groups made it an issue several decades ago.
Non-white appointments to the courts totaled four under President Richard Nixon, five under President Lyndon B. Johnson and three under President John F. Kennedy, while each of them named only one woman to the federal bench, according to the Pew Center data. President Dwight Eisenhower’s 73 judicial appointees were all white men.
“Courts should look like the people they represent,” the American Constitution Society, a liberal nonprofit organization, said in a recent commentary on judicial appointments.