HuffPost: ‘Stunning Diversity’: How Joe Biden Reshaped The Courts In 2023
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on December 28, 2023.
Jake Faleschini, the director of justice programs at Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group, said that Biden still has nearly 100 court vacancies to fill heading into 2024. It’s possible to fill them all, he said, but Democrats have to make sure at every opportunity that Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are “fully packed” with Biden’s judicial nominees, and that they continue voting to confirm them for the full year.
“If they do that, they’ll finish up stronger than the Trump administration,” he said. “Trump got 234 judges. If Democrats keep going, and at the pace of the last three years, they can outpace that.”
[…]
“The quality of the nominees in 2023 really stands out,” said Faleschini. “We got so many of these folks through who had been waiting for the first two years of the administration. They finally got through last summer. Just very, very high-quality nominees.”
Faleschini hailed two of Biden’s pending nominees to U.S. appeals courts, too: Nicole Berner, a former Planned Parenthood litigator and longtime union lawyer, and Adeel Mangi, a litigator and partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. They would be historic LGBTQ+ and Muslim federal judges, respectively.
Mangi in particular “is just an exceptional candidate,” Faleschini said.
[…]
Faleschini was hopeful about Biden catching up to Trump’s judicial confirmations in 2024, even though it’s an election year and lawmakers will increasingly turn their focus to their own contests.
“I am slightly disappointed,” he said of Biden’s pace in 2023, “but given the quality of the nominees, it’s forgivable.”