How Biden has restored fairness to the courts

President Joe Biden reached a milestone last week with the Senate’s confirmation of Angela Martinez and Dena Coggins, the 200th and 201st judges Biden has nominated to the federal judiciary thus far. Martinez will preside in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, and Coggins will take the bench in the Eastern District of California.

But the confirmation of these judges is worth noting for reasons that go beyond their stellar qualifications.

First, they represent the successful effort by both the administration and Democrats to diversify the federal bench. As pointed out by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and reported by Kaia Hubbard and Melissa Quinn for CBS News, the Senate under Biden has now confirmed more Black women to the U.S. Courts of Appeal than all prior presidents combined.

Likewise, as detailed by Nick Mourtoupalas for The Washington Post, more judges of color have been confirmed under Biden than any president in history. This represents a drastic departure from the record of his predecessor, Donald Trump. 

As Mourtoupalas notes:

Across the Supreme Court, Circuit, and District courts, 65 percent of Trump’s appointments are White men. Just 13 percent of Biden’s Senate-confirmed appointments so far are White men, according to a Post analysis of self-reported race and ethnicity data from the Federal Judicial Center.

Biden has also successfully confirmed a record number of judges with public defender backgrounds to judgeships for the U.S. Courts of Appeal, and he is the only president in history to have appointed more women than men to the federal bench.

However, there is another reason to applaud Biden’s unique achievement, other than the fact that he’s transforming the federal bench into an institution more representative of actual U.S. society. That reason has become clear during the past four years, as the importance of the federal judiciary has been magnified—and distorted—in ways it never has before.