WASHINGTON ― If you like all the progressive judges that President Joe Biden has put on the federal bench since taking office, you can thank the one person without whom it could never have happened: Donald Trump.
The former president’s sabotage of two Georgia Senate runoffs in early January with his endless lies about “massive fraud” having cost him reelection almost certainly cost the two Republican incumbents their seats, giving Democrats control of the chamber and the ability to push through judicial nominations without a single GOP vote.
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“Trump handed it to them,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia who studies federal judicial appointments, adding that Biden’s record-tying string of 40 district and appellate court judges in his first year would have been impossible in a Republican-controlled Senate. “They just wouldn’t have had the votes. I don’t know what they would have done.”
Biden has won praise from across the Democratic spectrum for judicial picks that have put Native American and other ethnic and racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community on the federal bench. Biden has also drawn from a broader range of professional backgrounds ― public defenders and voting rights attorneys, for example, rather than just prosecutors and corporate lawyers ― than previous presidents, even previous Democratic presidents. Of the 40 Biden judges confirmed so far (35 more are already in the pipeline), a full 80% are...
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