Biden Vetoes Bill Adding 66 Needed Federal District Judgeships To Prevent Trump Filling Them
Biden vetoed it to spite Trump.
On December 23, late into the night, when people prepped for Christmas Eve, President Joe Biden vetoed S. 4199.
S. 4199, also known as “Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved Act of 2024” or the “JUDGES Act of 2024,” would have added 66 federal district judgeships over a decade.
The bill meant to help “25 district courts in 13 states including California, Texas, and Delaware.”
Case filings have exploded lately, causing massive workloads for judges and staff. The Hill reported that “pending federal civil cases has risen 346 percent over the past 20 years, with roughly 82,000 cases pending as of March.”
Hence why the bill had bipartisan support and all senators voted for it.
Here’s the thing. The House played politics with the bill. Honestly…who can blame them?
The Senate passed the bill unanimously in August. That means the
But we all know that bills need to start in the House.
Well, in August, we all thought VP Kamala Harris would win in November. So the Republican-controlled House did not pick up the bill.
That is…until after November 5, when President-elect Donald Trump demolished Harris.
Biden threatened to vet S. 4199.
The House passed the bill 236-173. Most of the Democratic representatives voted against it.
Biden didn’t keep it a secret that he voted for it to deny Trump an opportunity to appoint judges:
S. 4199 seeks to hastily add judgeships with just a few weeks left in the 118th Congress. The House of Representative’s hurried action fails to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the new judgeships are allocated, and neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate explored fully how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships. The efficient and effective administration of justice requires that these questions about need and allocation be further studied and answered before we create permanent judgeships for life-tenured judges.
S. 4199 would create new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies. 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’s veto disappointed Judge Robert Conrad, the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
“It is not a bill that was hastily put together. Rather it is the product of careful and detailed analysis which considers primarily the weighted caseload per active judge in each judicial district, while also factoring in the contribution of senior judges, magistrate judges and visiting judges,” stated Conrad, as reported by The Hill.
Conrad called out Biden: “This veto is a deviation from the long historical pattern of approving judgeship bills that awarded new judgeships to sitting Presidents. The President’s veto is contrary to the actions of Senator Biden who helped pass many of those bills.”
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Comments
Yet another reason the whole concept of Lame Duck sessions should be eliminated.
Lame Duck actions should be restricted to emergency measures, and those alleged “emergencies” need to be detailed explicitly and will necessarily be tested in court as part of the process.
In general, the actual lame ducks (who have lost or are leaving office for any reason) need to be restricted from a wide range of actions … because we just have too many despicable, dishonest, dangerous criminals in our society who have infested governmental positions.
Nope, no actions. You’re out of office the day Before election day.
The president too, or just Congress?
In any case, that would take a constitutional amendment.
Though you could come close without an amendment, by moving the election to December. Nothing in the constitution says when elections are to be held. Congress sets that date, and can change it.
I agree but the dems won’t go along with it unless it was Trump leaving office
Exactly, There is nothing in government as dangerous as a lame duck. It’s an open invitation for mischief and nothing good can come of it.
So bring up the bill again in January, re-pass it with the Republican majority, and have Trump sign it and start nominating judges ASAP.
Keep in mind that the Democrats in the Senate will filibuster the bill.
Make them talk if they want to do that.
And this is exactly what is going to happen. Biden is an idiot.
they don’t call him brandon for nothing.
In the next session of Congress, the same bill can be quickly passed and signed into law so Mr. Biden’s tantrum is moot.
In fact, the sponsors can rename the bill the “Joe Biden Was A Terrible President Act”.
You may be missing the dynamic here. The bill was “quickly passed” this session because Democrats believed Joe would be filling the vacancies. Now that they will be filled by Trump, this bill will not be “quickly passed” next session despite being word-for-word identical.
The bill is already written, as stated above, simply reissue and re-pass it in January 2025.
Biden’s tantrum is just that – childish anger.
Can the House not override his veto?
.
Both houses would need to do that, and it would have to be a 2/3 vote in each. Impossible without the Democrats on board.
Plus the new Congress would be in session before they could get around to it anyway..
A competent Democrat President would have had 66 names ready for the Democrat controlled Senate to confirm.
No, the bill doesn’t allow that. It portions out the judgeships over a ten-year period, to give some of them to each successive president. Thus Biden was supposed to get a share, but he didn’t get that, so he vetoed it. If he had signed it he would still only get a small number of appointments.
This is further evidence that Biden has lost his mental faculties.
The bill allowed for appointments over a period of 10 years. That means that Trump would have appointed judges in only 4 of the 10 years.
Biden’s fears are unfounded to the extent he thought that Trump would appoint all of the judges.
No, he didn’t think Trump would appoint them all. But the deal was that he would have first stab at appointing some. The House deliberately sat on the bill to stop that, and this is his revenge.
Lost his mental faculties or has a mean streak a mile wide on his back, Your guess.
My guess is both.
Joe Biden* was always a stupid, vile, spiteful c*nt.
Only revenue bills.
What’s the big deal, anyway? Traitor Joe is being his petty, small self and the GOP COngress will pass the same bill in January and Trump will sign it and fill the spots. No big deal.
I think Biden is just signing whatever is put in front of him. I don’t believe that he had the faculties to make a decision on what he has for breakfast much less things like this.
As far as the Dems Filibustering bills. Stop this “Cloture” crap and call the freaking vote. Make them vote their convictions so everyone can see.
Calling the fricking vote is cloture. That’s what cloture means. A motion to end debate and call the motion.
And it takes a 3/5 vote to pass it. With 47 Dems you’d need 7 of them to break ranks and that’s not going to happen easily. Or you need to make a deal with the Dems, giving them something in return for letting it through.
I was tired when I wrote that, you are correct in the terms, my problem is when they just give up before they call for Cloture if they don’t have 60 votes and no vote ever happens. Start making them actually vote and get their votes on record. Then start hitting them with the ads of what they voted against.
If they want to filibuster then make them actually do it make them stand there and speak and follow the senate rules to the letter. No food or water, must stand, may not lean, sit, or use desk or chair for support. Because let’s get this straight, none of these mental lightweights have the stamina to pull off a long running filibuster, they might miss a party or an opportunity to shove their face into a camera.
The fewer judges there are, the less damage they can do.
Does anyone really think that Biden signed the veto? This was vetoed by Obama and Jarrett. They were the real power behind Biden. 25 days until Biden fades into a memory care unit.
Vetoes don’t have to be signed. The president simply returns the bill to the originating house, with his objections.
You may suspect that 0bama and Jarrett are making all the decisions, but good luck proving that. Even if you’re convinced that Biden isn’t making them, that doesn’t tell you who is.
No, they don’t. Only bills for raising revenue need to start in the House. And even that’s only a technicality, because the senate can amend a bill that has come from the House and insert any provisions it likes, and send it back to the House to see whether it agrees.
They do it but it’s un-Constitutional. Criminal, even.
I understand the BS that the bill “originated” in the House … but the REVENUE RAISING originated, in those cases, in the Senate, and that is un-Constitutional.
No, it is not unconstitutional. The constitution explicitly says that the senate can amend even revenue-raising bills, and of course it can amend other bills. That necessarily means it can insert new revenue raising clauses into any bill that originated in the house, whether or not the house version raised any revenue.
Turning a non-revenue raising bill into a revenue-raising bill is a completely different animal. That is NOT ALLOWED. They are changing the class of the bill, not just amending it.
You have to be completely disingenuous and corrupt to try and argue that the Senate is allowed to take a bill and change its class into one that the Senate is not allowed to originate.
Stuff like this is why people detest lawyers. No operation can turn a man into a woman – no matter how much he might end up looking like a woman – and no Senate action can turn a non-revenue raising bill from the House into a revenue-raising one, since the Constitution disallows the origination of such to the House.
The test is simple:
When did Bill X become a revenue-raising bill. In what body did this change happen (that is the “origination” of the revenue raising to anyone with an IQ over 75 – which excludes about 42% of democrats)? If that body is not the House then it is un-Constitutional.
End of story.
That is absolute bullshit. You are making things up out of your bottom. None of what you say has any basis in law or history or anything else that is real. You’re no better than Biden claiming that there were weapons that people in the 1780s were not allowed to own, or Tlaib claiming that Jesus was a “Palestinian”.
In any case when did the senate ever turn a non-revenue-raising bill into a revenue-raising one? I don’t think it’s ever happened. They add revenue-raising provisions but only to bills that already contained such provisions. The 0bamacare bill, for instance, amended a tax bill that had been sent up from the House.
The Senate is called the “Hundred Kings” for a darned good reason. House members write bills, they go to the Senate, and have *every* word removed from the inside and replaced with whatever the Senate wants. Whether the bills starts in the Senate or the House is a moot point. Around half of the budget ‘segments’ that were in the continuing resolution had already been passed by the House in regular order, but hit the Senate like an egg into a concrete wall. This includes the ‘child cancer’ bill that had been languishing on the Senate side after being passed by the House, only to be hurried through and voted when the Dems took the disgusting step of sticking it in the continuing resolution and claiming Evil Republicans were stopping cancer funding.
We don’t hate politics enough.
Yes that’s the way in practice the institutions function. There’s nothing stopping the HoR majority from rejecting the modifications made by the Senate. The HoR could always tell the Senate to pound sand, vote down the amendments made by the Senate then send the original bill back to them. Doing so would really upset the DC Apple cart and would PO the Senate and the individual Senators who have grown accustomed to being able to insert or remove items from legislation more/less unchecked in practice.
Biden AKA outsiders came up with this plan… he has no clue whats going on
“Biden vetoed it to spite Trump.”
No, he vetoed it to spite the American people, for whom the Communists – er, I mean the Democrats – have nothing but utter contempt, and which they spent the last four years proving.