Senate to ramp up work on Biden’s judicial nominees

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Thursday that the Senate will soon start voting on President Biden’s judicial nominees.

Schumer’s comments, made from the Senate floor, come as the Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to vote on its first slate of judicial picks next week, making them available for consideration.

“The Senate will begin to fill judicial vacancies very soon,” Schumer said. “The Senate is now going to scale up our efforts to fill more than 80 vacancies in the federal judiciary.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on five judicial nominees next week, two for the influential circuit courts and three district court judges. That includes Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is viewed as a possible nominee for the Supreme Court if a vacancy emerges, to be a United States circuit judge for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Schumer said that Democrats will “swiftly and routinely take up President Biden’s appointments,” whom they have the ability to confirm without GOP support.

Former President Trump got 234 total judicial nominees confirmed by the Senate, including three Supreme Court nominees, setting the second fastest confirmation pace for a U.S. president, according to the Article Three Project, a conservative group supportive of Trump’s picks.

Those judicial picks were largely young, white and conservative, helping Trump fulfill a decades-long goal of promoting conservatives to reshape the federal judiciary.

Schumer argued that Biden’s nominees will help counterbalance Trump’s.

“It will redress the imbalance that the Trump administration caused by choosing so many judges who were so far hard-right,” he said.