Following several blockbuster Supreme Court decisions that drew swift pushback from President Joe Biden, the White House is touting the first-term president’s judicial confirmations, noting he is outpacing his predecessors and pointing to the diversity of his choices.

What You Need To Know

  • About two and a half years into his presidency, Biden has seen 136 federal judges confirmed, racking up more confirmations than the previous three men in the Oval Office at this point in each of their first terms, according to the White House.

  • The Biden administration specifically highlighted the diversity of the new judges, with two-thirds of those confirmed women and two-thirds people of color
  • According to the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization, two women of color were confirmed to the circuit courts during former President Donald Trump’s presidency.
  • The former president also nominated three of the nine current Supreme Court justices, leaving a solid conservative majority on the high court that has since issued a number of high-profile, controversial and precedent-reversing rulings
  • Biden has only had the chance to nominate one justice thus far, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

About two and a half years into his presidency, Biden has seen 136 federal judges confirmed, racking up more confirmations than the previous three men in the Oval Office – former Presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush – at this point in each of their first terms, according to the White House.

The Biden administration specifically highlighted the diversity of the new judges, with two-thirds of those confirmed women and two-thirds people of color. According to the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization, two women of color were confirmed to the circuit courts during Trump’s presidency.

Last week, the Supreme Court delivered contentious rulings on the use of affirmative action in college admissions and Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, leading Biden to say “this is not a normal court,” when asked by a reporter whether he thought the high court was rogue.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointed to the diversity of Biden’s judicial picks when pressed during a briefing about whether the president had a solution to counter a court he considers “not normal.”

“We want an administration, that includes the court, that looks like America, and that's what this President has done,” she said. “And I think that's an action that he has been very deliberate about, very, very methodical about, so that we can have a court system that is reflective, a court system that is fair, a court system that is diverse.  And so that is an action that he has taken.”

The Biden administration is hoping to offset Trump’s efforts to stack the judiciary with young conservatives. The former president also nominated three of the nine current Supreme Court justices, leaving a solid conservative majority on the high court that has since issued a number of high-profile, controversial and precedent-reversing rulings.

Biden has had the chance to nominate one justice thus far, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Biden’s flurry of judicial confirmations comes despite a swarm of controversary around the topic when Sen. Dianne Feinstein's, D-Calif., absence from Congress stalled Biden’s nominations for weeks.

Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, missed 10-weeks due to shingles. That meant that the committee’s votes were tied along party lines and Democrats could not move forward with any nominees without Republican support.

Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ efforts to temporarily replace Feinstein on the committee during her absence.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.