WASHINGTON (CN) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he would veto bipartisan legislation that sponsors say is aimed at easing the burden of crushing caseloads on judges in federal district courts, placing a black cloud over the bill even as the House prepares to vote on it.
The White House’s announcement comes as some congressional Democrats have backed away from the bill, suggesting that House Republicans intentionally waited until after President-elect Donald Trump was reelected to consider the measure.
If made law, the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved, or JUDGES, Act would add 63 new judgeships to federal district courts across the country. The bill’s sponsors and legal experts have said that the legislation would address massive backlogs in district courts, where more than 700,000 cases are awaiting judgment.
The measure would also give at least three presidential administrations the opportunity to appoint new judges, splitting up the proposed judgeships over a 12-year period.
But the Biden administration, writing in a policy statement published Tuesday afternoon, contended that the bill was “unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice.” The JUDGES Act, the White House argued, would create new judgeships in states such as Florida, where senators have held up existing judicial vacancies.
“Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” the administration said.
House Democrats on Monday staked out a similar position, arguing during a meeting in the House Committee on Rules that the timing of the JUDGES Act was suspect.
New York Representative Jerry Nadler, the Democratic ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, argued that the legislation had been designed to pass before November’s presidential election, so that neither party would know who would be in the White House for the first round of appointments.
The Senate unanimously passed its version of the JUDGES Act in August — but the House did not take up the bill until this week.
That delay, Nadler said, represented a “tragic breakdown” of bipartisanship. He urged fellow Democrats not to vote for the bill on the House floor.
And the Biden administration on Tuesday agreed with Nadler’s reasoning.
“Hastily adding judges with just a few weeks left in the 118th Congress would fail to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the judges are allocated,” the White House said. Further, the administration added, Congress did not fully explore how magistrate judges in federal district courts, or judges who have taken senior status, affect the need for new federal district judgeships.
Indiana Senator Todd Young, the JUDGES Act’s lead sponsor, told Courthouse News Tuesday that he hoped the White House would reconsider its veto threat.
“It’s a commonsense solution to a longstanding political challenge,” he said with a shrug.
Delaware Senator Chris Coons, the top Democrat on the bill, told reporters that it was “unfortunate” that “some political things” in the House vote led to a delay and put his legislation in jeopardy.
“Senator Young and I worked in good faith here in the Senate to get the bill structured in a way where none of un knew yet who the next president would be,” Coons said. “I still think we need more judges, and I hope that we’ll be able to return to this in a future Congress and create them.”
House Republicans have argued that the perceived slow-walking of the JUDGES Act was merely a product of timing. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told the House Committee on Rules Monday that lawmakers were balancing other priorities in addition to the proposed judgeships legislation and that the bill was “as fair as it’s going to get.”
But Carl Tobias, chair of the University of Richmond School of Law, pushed back, arguing that Democrats were right to accuse Republicans of “gaming the system.”
“Democrats are lashing out because they feel that the Republicans weren’t playing straight, and you can’t blame them for that,” he told Courthouse News in an interview. “It doesn’t help the judges or judicial resources, but Democrats are sticking to their guns, and they deserve credit for that.”
The White House was also right to point out that many of the new judgeships proposed under the JUDGES Act would be in states — Texas, Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina — where GOP lawmakers have held up the Biden administration’s efforts to appoint federal district judges to existing vacancies, Tobias said.
But he took issue with the contention that Congress had not adequately considered the impacts of senior status judges and magistrate judges on the allocation of new judgeships. The JUDGES Act is based on longstanding recommendations from the U.S. Judicial Conference, which Tobias explained would likely have considered those factors.
“I can’t imagine that the Judicial Conference would have sent over what they did to Congress without having done that,” he said.
Gabe Roth, director of reform-minded judicial advocacy group Fix the Court, called the White House’s argument about senior status judges “a reason — a bad one at that — in search of a problem.” Senior judges nearing retirement and magistrate judges with less jurisdiction do not plug the holes left by the absence of more federal district judges, he said in a statement.
Roth urged the Biden administration to undo its veto threat.
“Sometimes, it’s important to put principles above politics,” he said. “This is one of those times, and the principles of access to justice and reliving burned out public servants are worthy of support no matter how your party is doing in the polls.”
Tobias agreed that no matter the political reasoning, strained federal district courts — and Americans seeking justice through them — stand to be hurt by the collapse of the JUDGES Act.
“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” he said. “The losers are the judges in those districts, and the litigants, of course.”
Congress, tasked with overseeing the federal judiciary, hasn’t added a new federal judgeship since 2003. The last comprehensive judgeships bill was in 1990.