Nice Time: Joe Biden Is Good At Picking Judges!
Joe Biden is nominating more judges. And they are very good judges!
Last week, the White House announced Joe Biden's fourth slate of nominees for the federal bench. I am happy to report that he is still doing a great job!
We have always had a representation problem in our courts — and I'm not just talking about the disproportionate number of old white men. At all levels of our court system, the vast majority of judges have come from the same two places: prosecutor's offices and corporate defense firms. Even Barack Obama, who did a really good job putting more women and racial and ethnic minorities on the bench, stuck mostly to people who put people in jail or defended grotesque capitalism for a living. (After law school, Obama was also a corporate defense lawyer.)
The other new Biden nominees are:
- Jia Cobb, a civil rights attorney and former public defender, to the District of DC;
- Sarah Merriam, a former public defender, to the District of Connecticut;
- Omar Williams, another former public defender, to the District of Connecticut;
- Tovah Calderon, a civil rights lawyer for the DOJ, to the DC Court of Appeals;
- Sarala Vidya Nagala, a federal prosecutor, to the District of Connecticut; and
- Kenia Seoane Lopez, a current magistrate judge who has worked in the domestic violence division of DC courts, to the Superior Court of DC.
So far, confirming Biden's judicial picks has been one thing all 50 Democrats (and "Democrats") in the Senate are able to agree on. The Senate started confirming the first slate of Biden judges earlier this month. Four judges have been added to district courts in New Jersey, Colorado, and Maryland, and likely future SCOTUS justice Ketanji Brown Jackson officially took her seat on the DC Circuit last week.
We need to put as many judges on the federal bench as humanly possible — and we need to do it as fast as we can. Senate Dems and the Biden administration need to aim for having zero judicial vacancies before the 2022 elections. The Senate map in 2022 is better than it has been the last couple of cycles, but the Senate is still an anti-democratic body (that should be abolished). Mitch McConnell is already publicly promising to do everything he can to obstruct progress if the fascists Republicans take back the Senate.
But so far, so good! And we can't wait to see who Biden nominates next.
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