Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, seen at an April 2022 White House event celebrating her Senate confirmation, was President Joe Biden’s sole U.S. Supreme Court nominee. The 235 federal judges confirmed during Biden’s presidency set records for racial and gender diversity. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s number of lifetime appointments to the federal bench surpassed the first Trump administration’s Friday and set records as the most diverse selection of judges by any president in U.S. history, according to federal judiciary observers.
The U.S. Senate, late in its final session of the year, confirmed what are expected to be the final two of Biden’s nominations, bringing his total number of judicial confirmations to 235, just one more than President-elect Donald Trump’s first-term total.
Senators voted along party lines to confirm Benjamin J. Cheeks to be U.S. district judge for the Southern District of California, in a vote of 49-47, and Serena Raquel Murillo to be U.S. district Judge for the Central District of California, in the same vote breakdown.
Cheeks marks the 63rd Senate-confirmed Black judge appointed by Biden, and Murillo the 150th woman.
Four senators did not vote, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s secretary of State nominee, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, newly sworn Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and the outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Senate control will be in Republican hands after the new Congress is sworn in Jan. 3, almost certainly shutting the door on any Biden nominations before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Among Biden’s appointments, 187 were seated on district courts, 45 on federal appeals courts, and one, Ketanji Brown Jackson, on the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as two to the Court of International Trade.
Biden issued a statement Friday night marking the “major milestone.”
“When I ran for President, I promised to build a bench that looks like America and reflects the promise of our nation. And I’m proud I kept my commitment to bolstering confidence in judicial decision-making and outcomes,” Biden said.
“I am proud of the legacy I will leave with our nation’s judges,” Biden said, closing out his statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer touted the “historic” accomplishment on the Senate floor following the vote.
“We’ve confirmed more judges than under the Trump administration, more judges than any administration in this century, more judges than any administration going back decades. One out of every four active judges on the bench has been appointed by this majority,” Schumer said.
He and members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary delivered a press conference immediately after.
Historic racial and gender diversity
Observers who monitor the demographics and professional backgrounds represented on the federal bench celebrated the “remarkable and historic progress” made under Biden, according to a Friday memo from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Biden set records for appointing the most women and more Black, Native American, Latino and Latina, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander judges than during any other presidency of any length, according to the organization’s analysis.
The Senate confirmed 15 Black judges to the federal appeals courts during Biden’s term, 13 of them women. Only eight Black women had ever served at this level of the federal judiciary, according to the analysis.
On the district court level, Biden appointed the first lifetime judges of color to four districts that had only ever been represented by white judges. They include districts in Louisiana, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia.
Biden also appointed, and the Senate confirmed, 12 openly LGBTQ judges, three of them women; the first four Muslim judges ever to reach the federal bench; and two judges currently living with disabilities.
“Our federal court system has historically failed to live up to its promise of equal justice under the law,” the Leadership Conference’s Friday memo stated. “For far too long, our judges have disproportionately been white, cisgender, heterosexual men who have possessed very narrow legal experiences as corporate attorneys or government prosecutors. Judges decide cases that impact all of our rights and freedoms, and it is vital that our judges come from more varied backgrounds both personally and professionally.”
Nearly 100 of Biden’s appointments previously worked as civil rights lawyers or public defenders, according to the leadership conference, including Jackson who was the first former public defender elevated to the Supreme Court.
Biden’s confirmed judges stood in contrast to Trump’s picks who, the American Constitution Society noted, lacked gender and racial diversity.
According to data published by the Pew Research Center at the close of Trump’s first term, the now president-elect was more likely than previous Republican presidents to nominate women but still lagged behind recent Democratic administrations.
Pew also found that Trump had appointed fewer non-white federal judges than other recent presidents.
Blocked nominee faults Islamophobia
But not everyone praised the Senate’s advice-and-consent role in evaluating federal nominees. Adeel Mangi, the first Muslim American to be nominated for the appeals court level, criticized Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for asking Islamophobic questions.
In a letter to Biden, published by the New York Times and other outlets, Mangi slammed the process as “fundamentally broken” and questioned the reasoning behind three Democratic senators who joined Republicans in opposing him.
“This is no longer a system for evaluating fitness for judicial office. It is now a channel for the raising of money based on performative McCarthyism before video cameras, and for the dissemination of dark-money-funded attacks that especially target minorities,” wrote Mangi, of New Jersey, whom Biden nominated for a position on the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Other blocked nominations included Julia M. Lipez of Maine, nominated for the First Circuit, Karla M. Campbell of Tennessee for the Sixth Circuit, and Ryan Young Park of North Carolina for the Fourth Circuit.