Biden rivals Trump fast clip of federal judge confirmations

[Geee]

Washington Examiner

 

President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell turned the judicial confirmation process into a well-oiled machine. President Joe Biden is adopting their approach and then some.

Trump, as president from 2017 to 2021, and McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who was Senate majority leader at the time, made the confirmation of federal judges a top priority. Biden is, depending on the metric, moving just as fast or even more swiftly than his predecessor.

 

To be sure, Biden to date hasn't had the chance to appoint Supreme Court justices, where confirmation hearings are national spectacles. Trump got three Supreme Court appointments, including one waiting for him when he entered office in January 2017, which resulted in Neil Gorsuch joining the bench (followed by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett). By the end of Trump's term, the Supreme Court had a roughly 6-3 conservative majority.

But the Biden confirmation numbers for federal district and appeals court justices are stark. Twenty-eight Biden nominees have been confirmed by the Senate as of Nov. 3, whereas Trump only had 10 confirmations to lower courts by the same period in 2017.