Senate Democrats drop 4 appeals court picks, including Adeel Mangi, so they can confirm 12 judges

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Senate Democrats have reached a deal with their Republican counterparts to confirm a dozen judges nominated by President Joe Biden while pulling four of his nominees from consideration, the latest step in a battle over who controls the nation’s federal courthouses on the eve of a second Donald Trump presidency.

At the same time, lawmakers are facing new pushback against a bill that would increase the number of federal judges across the country, with some Democrats reluctant to give Trump more judgeships to fill.

The bill – known as the Judges Act – was initially bipartisan, passing unanimously in the Senate over the summer. It remained stalled in the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday night as lawmakers headed home for the Thanksgiving recess.

The chief judge of the Southern District of New York called on lawmakers to act quickly, saying judges are desperately needed to help manage the growing caseload in federal courts, regardless of which president may nominate them.

“The Southern District of New York, like most federal courts across the country, is feeling the strain of the federal judgeship shortage,” Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain said in a statement. “Passing the JUDGES Act, which would add two much-needed judgeships to our district and provide much-needed relief to additional districts across the country over a period of several years, is essential to ensuring timely access to justice and preserving public trust in our federal courts.”

Democrats have been racing to confirm as many judges as possible before they lose power in Washington. Trump appointed 237 federal judges during his first term, moving the federal judiciary sharply to the right. Biden has tried to match the effort, choosing mostly liberal judges for the federal bench who are far more diverse than those chosen by past presidents.

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Biden’s 221st judicial nominee, with more expected to come when the upper chamber returns from the Thanksgiving recess in December. But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) told The Washington Post that all of Biden’s remaining appeals court nominees will be withdrawn as part of the deal struck with Republicans to get 12 lower-court judges confirmed.

He said none of the four had the 50 votes needed for Senate confirmation. The four appeals court nominees pending in the Senate are: Ryan Young Park to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit; Julia M. Lipez to the 1st Circuit; Karla M. Campbell to the 6th Circuit; and Adeel A. Mangi to the 3rd Circuit.

Mangi, of New Jersey, would have been the nation’s first Muslim American appeals court judge. Mangi faced opposition from Republicans and some Democrats over his ties to various groups, including a criminal justice organization that advocates on behalf of incarcerated individuals and a law school center for Muslim, Arab and South Asian Americans.

“The trade was four circuit nominees – all lacking the votes to get confirmed – for more than triple the number of additional judges moving forward,” the spokesman said in an email.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said he was “mystified,” by Senate Democrats’ decision to forgo the administration’s nominees for appeals courts, which have the authority to overturn lower court decisions. The deal was first reported by Fox News.

“Both Democrats and Republicans put so much emphasis on the appeals courts, as opposed to the district courts, because there’s so many fewer of them and they have so much more power,” Tobias said.

Senate Democrats will instead have the chance while they remain in the majority to confirm 12 of Biden’s lower-court nominees, five of whom were advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Seven other nominees will not advance. They are still in committee or awaiting confirmation hearings. Across the country there are 28 additional federal court vacancies for which Biden never named a nominee, most of them in red states whose senators probably would have opposed his picks.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, federal judges are pressing lawmakers to pass the Judges Act. The bill would create 66 judgeships across the country over 10 years. Of those newly created judgeships, 63 would be permanent and three would be temporary.

Judge Kimberly Mueller of the Eastern District of California warned of what could happen if lawmakers don’t pass the Judges Act, saying criminal defendants are waiting far too long for trials and some lawsuits are delayed for more than three years because of an insufficient number of judges.

“The Eastern District of California is a poster child for what happens,” Mueller said. “Litigants don’t get their day in court as quickly as they should. Cases languish.”

“If someone is sitting in a pretrial detention facility, that creates all sorts of issues for the defendant, but also for our Marshal Service having to transport the person, keep the person in a local jail,” she added.

Over the past 20 years, the number of civil cases pending more than three years rose 346 percent, according to the Judicial Conference, the policymaking body of the U.S. Courts. There were more than 80,000 such cases as of March 31, the conference said.

The bill to create additional judgeships – which is sponsored by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Todd Young (R-Indiana), James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) and Alex Padilla (D-California) – is based on the Judicial Conference’s 2023 recommendations.

The positions would be created starting in 2025 and ending in 2035.