In the first six months of his administration, President Biden and his Democrats have had eight federal judges confirmed, the most in 52 years.
“Six months into their presidencies, Trump and George H.W. Bush had each appointed four judges. Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan hadn’t appointed any,” Axios reported.
A senior administration official told Axios, “There has historically been this view of a certain path to a judgeship that can be over-representative of prosecutors or law-firm lawyers. … And so, we’ve focused on getting the message out to make sure that we’ve got talented, young members of the profession thinking, ‘Oh, I could be a judge,’ and expressing interest in being a judge. We’re talking about people who are civil rights litigators, public defenders or might have taken other nontraditional paths toward being a judge.”
Trump was highly successful in appointing judges, 226 federal judges in all. Fifty-four of them were appointed to the federal appeals courts.
“Tiffany Cunningham became Biden’s eighth appointed judge when the Senate confirmed her on Monday to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit Judge for the Federal Circuit,” CNN reported on Wednesday. “In addition to Cunningham, Biden has had two other circuit judges and five district judges confirmed. … Last month, the Senate confirmed Zahid Quraishi as the first Muslim federal court judge in the nation’s history.”
New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, stated last week: “The Senate has already confirmed more circuit and district court judges before July 4 than during the first year of any presidency in recent history. We will continue this critical work in the months to come and restore balance — much needed balance — to the federal judiciary.”
As the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the hearings for the iconic conservative judge Robert Bork, Biden’s treatment of Bork was so transparently unfair, as Bork wrote later in his classic book, “The Tempting of America,” that The Washington Post wrote an editorial stating:
While claiming that Judge Bork will have a full and fair hearing, Senator Joseph Biden this week has pledged to civil rights groups that he will lead the opposition to the confirmation. As the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Sentence first—Verdict Afterward.” …
How can he possibly get a fair hearing from Biden, who has already cast himself as the role of prosecutor instead of a juror in the Judiciary Committee? If there is a strong, serious case to be argued against Judge Bork, why do so many Democrats seem unwilling to make it and afraid to listen to the other side?
Mary Ellen Bork, Robert Bork’s widow, wrote in September 2020:
Most people don’t remember the hearings on Robert Bork for nomination to the Supreme Court, but I do. I was there during the four months of vicious political campaigning against this judicial nominee, my husband, and in the Senate hearing room as then-Sen. Biden presided over a rigged hearing full of an unprecedented level of lying and distortion of a man known for his integrity and judicial wisdom. Democrats flagrantly lied about Bob’s record of opinions. On day four of the hearings Sen. Biden was accused of plagiarism and had to drop out of the presidential race. In the course of one week Sen. Biden orchestrated a vicious lying assault and was caught passing off someone else’s words as his own.