if they play their cards right over the next two years, Democrats may get as many judges on the federal bench as Republicans did during former Pres. Trump’s term. If they get lucky, they could end up with even more:
Still, it’s very possible for Biden to match or even out-appoint Trump, since that estimate does not account for additional judges who may step down unexpectedly due to health or other factors.
Biden was always going to have a hard time matching Trump’s influence over the courts — and he needed a minimum of four years with a Democratic-controlled Senate to pull it off. This, experts told us, is due to the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate refused to confirm most of former President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees in 2015 and 2016, leaving Trump with 105 vacancies to fill. By contrast, Biden came in with 45 vacancies.
More bad news for Biden: His judicial impact thus far has been geographically limited. Those leftover vacancies from the Obama era gave Trump the ability to eventually appoint 104 judges in states that currently have at least one Democratic senator, while there are swathes of the country where Biden isn’t making any judicial inroads. Only eight of Biden’s appointees are in states with at least one senator of the opposing party.
Biden’s changes to the judiciary — even if they end up being more limited than Trump’s — will still be important for the people whose fates are decided in courtrooms around the country. Christina Boyd, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who studies the courts, said that even though district court judges don’t have the power to set the law for entire regions, their decisions on issues like sentencing are still consequential.
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