White House officials on Tuesday said President Biden would veto a bipartisan measure creating 66 new federal judicial seats over the next three presidential administrations, stating that the measure the House is set to take up this week is “unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice.”
In a new statement, the officials, from the Office of Management and Budget, also noted that the legislation, which passed the Senate with no opposition in August, would create new vacancies in states where senators have dragged their feet on filling vacancies during the Biden administration.
“Those efforts to hold open judicial vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” the statement said.
The veto threat was a blow both to lawmakers who backed the measure and to officials of the federal judiciary who have pressed for years for more judges, citing a tremendous backlog of cases and the lack of a significant expansion of judgeships since 1990. But efforts to add seats have consistently run into political trouble as presidents and members of Congress try to game out who would be in position to name those jurists, an issue that proved again to be a complication for the legislation.
Proponents in both parties reached an understanding this year to approve the judicial legislation before the Nov. 5 election, so that lawmakers in both parties would be voting on it without knowing who the next president would be. It passed the Senate without any opposition in August.
But the bill sat idle in the Republican-controlled House until Donald J. Trump won, providing the G.O.P. with new incentive to pass it even as Senate Democrats are racing to fill as many judicial vacancies as possible with Mr. Biden’s nominees to deny Mr. Trump the chance.
Under the proposed legislation, Mr. Trump could potentially have about two dozen more seats to fill, along with any existing seats that open up over the next four years. The seats are for the lower-level trial courts, not at the appellate level, and it would not affect the Supreme Court.
“The magic of this undertaking was we were going to do it before the election, so no one knew who had the advantage or not,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I think the magic of the moment’s been lost.”
The bill was written by Senators Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close Biden ally, and Todd Young, Republican of Indiana. Both cited a pressing need for more federal district court judges in their states. Other states they saw as particularly in need of more judges include New Jersey, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho and Texas.
To defuse some of the politics, the authors of the bill spread out the new judicial seats over six rounds in the next three administrations through 2035. That way, no party could claim a clear advantage in the appointments because the future presidents are unknown.
“It was, I think, a dash of creativity to spread the judges over six tranches over three administrations,” said Mr. Coons, who was disappointed with the outcome and attributed it to the House’s inaction.
“There was an understanding that we would get it done at a time when it was unclear who would win, and that played an important role in my being able to get support for this,” said Mr. Coons. “This is a really unfortunate outcome when, on the Senate side, we did our job and we did it well.”
Mr. Young said he hoped that the latest White House statement was not the final word.
“I hope they reconsider,” he said. “This is a common-sense solution to a longstanding challenge, and I hope that in the end this solution finds its way into law.”
But with the House and Senate so closely divided, it was highly unlikely the bill’s backers could secure the two-thirds majority in the House and Senate needed to override a presidential veto.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said Mr. Biden’s act was driven strictly by partisan politics.
“It’s almost inconceivable that a lame-duck president could consider vetoing such an obviously prudential step for any reason other than selfish spite,” Mr. McConnell said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “Litigants across America deserve their day in court. And they deserve to know the federal judiciary has the bandwidth to carefully and thoroughly consider their cases.”
The clash over the expansion of the lower federal courts came as Senate Democrats were devoting significant effort to confirming federal judges nominated by Mr. Biden before Republicans take control of the Senate on Jan. 3.
The Senate is within reach of narrowly surpassing the 234 judges named to the federal courts by Mr. Trump in his first term and could hit that mark next week.
Mr. Biden has so far issued a dozen vetoes in his four years, most of them killing bids by congressional Republicans to overturn federal regulations and policy through a special procedural tactic.
In the veto threat, the White House said questions remained about how the new judgeships would be allocated and said that “hastily adding judges with just a few weeks left in the 118th Congress would fail to resolve key questions in the legislation.”
Progressive activists welcomed the White House plan to block the bill.
“It’s true our courts are overdue for expansion,” said Keith Thirion, interim president of the Alliance for Justice. “But it is a disservice to the public servants committed to equal justice to so blatantly weaponize this process. Filling our courts with even more lifetime Trump appointees who issue harmful rulings would not be an improvement.”
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