President Biden Breaks Record For Appointing Most Judges Of Color

Biden has appointed 40 Black women to lifetime federal judgeships, surpassing any president in a single term.

President Joe Biden has appointed 233 federal judges during his presidency, many of whom are people of color. This marks a historic milestone as the first president to appoint the highest number of judges of color.

On Dec. 9, the Senate confirmed Tiffany Johnson, President Biden’s latest judicial nominee for the Northern District of Georgia, NBC News reports. This marks the 40th Black woman he has appointed to lifetime federal judgeships, surpassing any president in a single term.

Data from the White House reveals that approximately 60% of President Biden’s 233 judicial appointees are people of color. On Dec. 12, the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider advancing two additional nominees for U.S. district judge, Benjamin Cheeks and Serena Raquel Murillo. If Cheeks is confirmed, Biden will have appointed 63 Black federal judges—the highest number by any president in U.S. history, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

It’s an accomplishment Biden doesn’t take in vain and is “proud to have strengthened the judiciary by making it more representative of the country as a whole and that legacy will have an impact for decades to come,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt wrote in an email statement.

Upon taking office in 2020, President Biden was committed to addressing disparities in the judiciary and making the federal bench more representative of the nation’s diversity.

“Even before taking office, President Biden signaled to the Senate that he wanted to make sure that people who had been historically excluded from our judiciary” were included, said Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the Fair Courts program and an adviser at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Biden is currently tied with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton with 62 Black federal judge appointees but is set to surpass them after the next Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

“The research shows that when you have more judges that have different perspectives because they’ve worked on different types of issues or they come from different communities, it improves the decision-making and it certainly improves the trust that communities might have in these institutions. So making sure we have fair-minded judges at all levels is really important.”

Senate Democrats pledged to confirm as many of President Biden’s nominees as possible before Republicans take control of the Senate in January and a potential Trump administration begins.

“This Senate will keep working to confirm more of President Biden’s excellent judicial nominees,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. tweeted last month.