Washington Post: Why Biden is falling behind on nominations
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on November 28, 2023.
Biden is seeking to surpass Trump’s total tally before next year, when Democrats could lose the Senate, the White House or both.
By Dec. 31, 2019, the end of Trump’s third year in office, the Senate had confirmed 187 judges. Blumenthal said he wants Democrats to surpass that number by the end of the year — a herculean task that would require the Senate to confirm 34 nominees, many of whom haven’t even had hearings yet.
“At this point, it’s numerically impossible,” Jake Faleschini, the program director for justice at the Alliance for Justice, another liberal judicial advocacy group, said of Democrats catching up this year.
Faleschini told us in August, after Biden fell behind Trump’s pace, that he had “no doubt” Democrats would catch up by the end of the year — an assessment he now acknowledges was overly optimistic.