Latest Biden veto proves he isn't going to make things easy for Trump
President Joe Biden on Monday vetoed a bill that would have allowed Donald Trump to stack federal district courts with dozens of new judges. It’s the latest move by the outgoing president to block Trump from imposing his ruinous will on the country.
The bill, titled the JUDGES Act of 2024, would have created 66 new judgeships over the next 10 years, with Trump getting as many as 25 of those new judicial seats to fill, according to Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat and the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.
In a statement, Biden said he vetoed the legislation because it is unclear "how the new judgeships are allocated.” Biden added that the bill would have rewarded the Republican senators who purposefully blocked his judicial nominations.
“Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” Biden wrote.
By vetoing the legislation, Biden ensures that Trump gets to install fewer right-wing judges. Trump’s appointees for his second term are likely to oppose abortion rights; support deregulation that lets corporations discriminate against workers, pollute the earth and aid in global warming; and allow Trump carte blanche with presidential immunity—among other things.
Despite Republicans’ attempts to block Biden’s judicial nominees, Biden was still able to put 235 judges on the federal bench—one more than the 234 Trump got confirmed in his first term. Biden also appointed more Black judges than any president in history‚ including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. In just one term, Biden appointed 63 Black judges, outdoing both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who shared the previous record of 62 across two terms.
The veto came a day after Biden commuted the sentences of 37 inmates on federal death row, before Trump could return to office and resume executions. Those prisoners will serve life in prison, but will not be put to death.
Biden opposes the death penalty, and halted federal executions while in office. Until Trump resumed them, federal executions had been paused for 15 years.
In 2021, before he was forced out of office kicking and screaming, Trump rushed to execute federal death row inmates before Biden could take office.
In the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration, Trump executed five prisoners—even though there had been a 130-year-old precedent of not executing inmates during a presidential transition.
In total, Trump executed 13 death row inmates in his four years in office. It was a massive killing spree, as just three prisoners had been executed in the 60 years prior to Trump, the Associated Press reported.
Last week, the Biden administration began pulling back pending regulations. The move ensures Trump can’t manipulate them for his own goals and enjoy the progress made by their original iterations. Instead, the AP notes, Trump will have to start at square one.