The House passed a bill Thursday that would create dozens of new federal district court judgeships for the first time in decades, although the Biden administration has threatened to veto it.
Supporters of the legislation, which passed the House 236-173 on Thursday and the Senate via unanimous consent in August, say the bill is aimed at addressing case backlogs in the federal court system.
The measure would add 63 permanent positions to the federal judiciary and three temporary positions. The permanent positions would be created in phases between 2025 and 2035. In total, 207 House Republicans and 29 House Democrats voted for the measure.
Members of both parties agreed the federal judiciary needs more judges. But the timing of the vote drew opposition from the Biden administration and some House Democrats, who said Republicans were playing political games by refusing to bring the bill up for a floor vote until after the November general election.
By waiting to vote on the bill until after the election, there is no longer uncertainty over which presidential candidate would get to appoint the first two tranches of judgeships, which would come in 2025 and 2027, Democrats argued.
New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, argued that when the bill arrived in the House, Republican leadership refused to touch it.
“If Republican leadership had brought the bill to the House floor in September, we could have passed it on suspension in no time,” Nadler said. “Back then, the president would still have been unknown, and the underlying promise of the bill was still present.”
Speaking on the floor, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., acknowledged the bill would have passed by unanimous consent had it been brought up sooner.
“I apologize to everyone here for the hour we’re taking for something that we should have done before” the election, he said.
But Issa said it would only be “pettiness today if we were to not do this because of who got to be first.” He compared the situation to a coin flip at the start of a football game, where the flip winner gets to decide whether they kick or receive the ball.
“Afterwards, it will go back and forth for a very long time. This is a very long time, and we should be the long thinkers on the most permanent body in government,” Issa said.
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said on the floor that sudden opposition to the bill from Democrats was “nothing more than childish foot-stomping.”
The Biden administration threatened to veto the bill earlier this week, saying in a statement of administration policy that the bill is “unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice.”
The statement said the bill would add new judgeships in states where senators “have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies.”
“Further, the Senate passed this bill in August, but the House refused to take it up until after the election,” the statement read.
Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said that when the bill arrived in the House, Republican leadership injected politics into the legislation. He argued that bringing the bill to the floor until after the election isn’t fair.
“You don’t get to pick the horse after that horse has already won the race, but that’s exactly what my Republican colleagues are seeking to do today,” he said.
Issa weighed in after Johnson’s speech.
“We often hear the term here in the House and throughout our country: ‘country before party.’ It’s clear we didn’t hear that here yet today on the other side of the aisle,” Issa said.
Congress has added a relatively smaller number of district court judgeships since 1990, created using appropriations or authorization bills, but the federal courts say they need much more based on an increase in caseload over the years. The Judicial Conference in 2023 called for 66 new district court judges and seven temporary judges to be made permanent.
Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, said in press releases that Biden should reconsider his veto threat given “the bill’s bipartisan origins, its broad support among Democratic judicial appointees and its importance to Delaware, whose federal court would get two new judgeships — a 50 percent increase.”
“As someone who’s worked for years on adding judgeships, I know how difficult it is to get to the right formula of which judgeships to add when, how much money is needed for appropriations and when in an election cycle to move legislation,” Roth said.
“We finally had each of these things in place and now comes a veto threat? That’s a slap in the face to our overworked federal judges, Democratic and Republican appointees alike, who say they desperately need the help,” Roth said.
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