President Biden's Judicial Appointments are the Most Qualified in a Generation

     60 judges. In 10 months, 60 judges have been confirmed to the federal bench by the United States Senate, a rate that is likely to continue through the end of the year; 33 more judges are awaiting Senate action while dozens more vacancies remain to be filled in courts from California to Alabama. President Obama appointed 62 judges in his first two years; President Trump appointed 85; President Bush appointed 100. However, the president to beat is Bill Clinton, who appointed 128 judges in his first two years. I think President Biden can get closer to 150 judges confirmed in his first two years, which would be a record pace. I've already highlighted how these judges are incredibly diverse and are reshaping the federal judiciary. However, today I'd like to take a moment to highlight their unique qualifications.

     Of these more than 90 judges, roughly 40 percent have been public defenders, the highest rate of any president in American history. His latest slate of five federal judges included three who had spent significant portions of time as public defenders. This makes sense, as Biden himself began his career as a public defender in Delaware in the late 1960s. While Republicans have, continue, and will continue to attack nominees who serve in this profession as being "soft on crime," they are dangerously ignoring the fact that these nominees will bring a unique perspective to the bench and have served in underpaid roles that guarantee the right to a vigorous defense for the accused. This is an important qualification for judges, and it will bring a more unique perspective into our criminal justice system as a whole.

     On ABA ratings. President Biden's nominees are the most overwhelmingly qualified since the era of Kennedy and Johnson. The ABA is not a biased organization, in spite of what the party who claims all of cable news, all of social media, and the Presidential Debate Commission are all biased against them says. President Clinton had four nominees ranked "not qualified" by the ABA, President Bush had nine, and President Trump had eight. Like President Obama, President Biden has had zero. Like his cabinet members (something he sustained criticism for when he should have gotten praise), President Biden's judicial nominees almost all went to Ivy League Schools. Many have experience as judges at the state level, as clerks for appeals court judges and even Supreme Court justices, and even some as Obama-era federal bench appointees. The majority of his nominees have been ranked as "highly qualified" as opposed to the middle category of "qualified."

     Just look at Ketanji Brown Jackson: the claim that she was unqualified was laughable. She was confirmed by the Senate three times as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a federal judge appointed to the District Court for D.C. by President Obama, and an appeals court judge for the D.C. Appeals Court by President Biden in 2021. She had gotten an A.B. magna cum laude and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard and served as a supervising editor of the prestigious institution's law review before serving on the Board of Overseers there herself, and she had even clerked under Justice Stephen Breyer, the same justice she is set to replace this summer. She is literally as qualified as any human being could possibly be for that Supreme Court seat.

     They may not agree with their legal philosophies, but Senate Republicans cannot and will not stop the confirmation of historic numbers of historic nominees for America's federal bench for one reason if no other: President Biden's judicial appointments are the most qualified in a generation.