Top Biden Senate Ally Upset Over Judiciary Veto

This week, Joe Biden announced that he was going to veto a bill that was initiated in the Senate to increase the judiciary by 66 judges over the next 10 years.

The bill passed on a bipartisan basis in the House and Senate, and now people are starting to speak up.

The Bill

The JUDGES Act, formally known as S. 4199, has been in the works for years, and it was co-sponsored by one of Biden’s biggest allies in the Senate, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE).

The bill would have added a total of 66 judges over a 10-year span in six different cycles. The first cycle would have been in 2025, then every two years until the 66 judges were added.

When Biden vetoed the bill, he made it sound as though Congress did not do its due diligence, which I am sure hit Coons rather tough. Biden stated, “S. 4199 seeks to hastily add judgeships with just a few weeks left in the 118th Congress.  The House of Representative’s hurried action fails to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the new judgeships are allocated, and neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate explored fully how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships.

“The efficient and effective administration of justice requires that these questions about need and allocation be further studied and answered before we create permanent judgeships for life-tenured judges.”

Coons is Upset

Coons, who was the co-chair of Biden’s campaign, clearly took the veto to heart.

After the bill went into the shredder, he stated, "I am disappointed by this outcome, for my own state and for the federal judges throughout the country struggling under the burden of ever-higher caseloads. I’ve worked on this bill for years, and thanks to tireless bipartisan effort with Senator Young, it made it to the president’s desk. It’s highly unfortunate that it will not become law.”

He then added, "Senator Young and I took pains to make this a nonpartisan process, structuring the JUDGES Act so that Congress could pass the bill before any of us – Republican or Democrat – knew who would occupy the White House in 2025 and therefore nominate the new federal judges.”

Coons, of course, had to take a shot at Republicans, putting the blame on them for waiting until after the election to pass the bill, but that is irrelevant due to the bipartisan support of the bill in both chambers. I have admitted that it was some gamesmanship on the part of Johnson, but there were dozens of Democrats who supported the bill in the House.

Judges Also Upset

In addition to members of Congress, members of the judiciary were also upset because they were hoping to lighten their caseloads and start chipping away at the backlog of cases on the docket right now.

U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, in part, stated, "The president's veto will contribute to the pattern of growing caseloads and increasing backlogs that hurt litigants and weakens public confidence in our courts.”

Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane, the top judge in the Southern District of Texas, added, "On the same day that sentences of scores of capital murders were commuted, the president denies or delays access to justice for ordinary people seeking their day in court through his veto.”

The obvious solution is to mimic the bill in the next session and represent the bill so that Trump could sign it into law, but knowing that Trump would get to appoint 22 judges, there is simply no way Democrats will ever support it. On that front, perhaps we should hold Johnson accountable. Maybe he should have rolled the dice back in August when the Senate passed the bill. Perhaps this is just one more reason to have him removed as the House Speaker.