Biden delivers on threat to veto bill to expand US judiciary

By Nate Raymond and Dan Burns

(Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday vetoed legislation to add 66 new judges to understaffed federal courts nationally, a once widely bipartisan measure that would have been the first major expansion of the federal judiciary since 1990.

The JUDGES Act, initially supported by many members of both parties, would have increased the number of trial court judges in 25 federal district courts in 13 states including California, Florida and Texas, in six waves every two years through 2035.

Hundreds of judges appointed by presidents of both parties took the rare step of publicly advocating for the bill, saying federal caseloads have increased by more than 30% since Congress last passed legislation to comprehensively expand the judiciary.

But the outgoing Democratic president made good on a veto threat issued two days before the bill passed the Republican-led House of Representatives on Dec. 12 on a 236-173 vote.

In a message to the Senate formally rejecting the bill, Biden said it "hastily" creates new judgeships without addressing key questions about whether new judges were needed and how they would be allocated nationally.

Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said in response that the veto was "partisan politics at its worst."

By staggering the new judgeships over three presidential administrations, the bill's sponsors had hoped to get around lawmakers' longstanding concerns about creating new vacancies that a president of an opposing party could fill.

It received the Democratic-led Senate's unanimous approval in August. But the bill lingered in the Republican-led House and was only taken up for a vote after Republican President-elect Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 election and the opportunity to name the first batch of 25 judges.

That prompted accusations from top House Democrats, who began to abandon the measure, that their Republican colleagues had broken a central promise of the legislation by having lawmakers approve the bill when no one knew who would appoint the initial wave of judges.

If the bill had been enacted, Trump would have been able to fill 22 permanent and three temporary judgeships over four years in office, on top of the 100-plus judicial appointments he is already expected to make.

Those appointments would allow Trump to further cement his influence on the judiciary. He made 234 judicial appointments during his first term in office, including three members of the U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority.

Biden on Friday surpassed Trump's total number of judicial appointments with 235, though he named fewer appellate judges and only one U.S. Supreme Court justice during his tenure.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Dan Burns in New York; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Nicholas Yong)