House passes bipartisan bill to add new judges that Biden has vowed to veto

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday passed a bipartisan bill backed by the federal judiciary that would create dozens of new judgeships despite President Joe Biden's pledge to veto it.

The legislation has already passed the Senate with bipartisan support and was considered to be uncontroversial — until President-elect Donald Trump won the election last month.

House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, of Massachusetts, sent a note before the vote Thursday urging colleagues to vote against the bill.

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“While this bill attempts to provide a solution to our backlogged court system, House Democrats should remain clear-eyed on what authorizing a significant number of new, empty judgeships means under a future Trump Administration,” she wrote.

The bill passed the House on a 236-173 vote Thursday, with 29 Democrats voting in favor and two Republicans voting against. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent in August.

“At that time, Democrats supported the bill — they thought Kamala Harris would win the presidency,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a statement. “Now, however, the Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to issue a veto threat and Democrats have whipped against this bill, standing in the way of progress, simply because of partisan politics.”

The bill would add 66 new district court judgeships as requested by the federal judiciary itself in order to alleviate bottlenecks in the court system.

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Although Democrats have complained that the bill will give Trump more judgeships to fill, the new judgeships would be staggered over time, meaning that he would have an opportunity to appoint only 25 of the 66.

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The bill was specifically designed to be nonpartisan and would be the first major expansion of judgeships since 1990.

“This measure would improve access to justice in the federal courts and improve judicial administration by adding critically needed new judgeships, while specifying that the appointments are to be spread out over a 10-year period,” said Judge Robert Conrad, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the agency that oversees the court system.

Biden threatened to veto the legislation Tuesday, with the White House saying it was "unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice."