Bonus 114: President Biden's Misbegotten Veto of the JUDGES Act

With an opportunity to put a modest, long-term court reform initiative ahead of short-term partisan interests, President Biden opted for the latter—and may thereby have ended up hurting both.

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I wanted to use this week’s bonus issue to reflect a bit on Monday’s move by President Biden to veto the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved (JUDGES) Act of 2024—a bill passed by bipartisan majorities of both chambers of Congress that would have created 63 new permanent judgeships (and three new temporary judgeships) in federal district courts across 13 different states, all of which have been found to have insufficient staffing to meet their current caseloads.

To avoid giving a huge boon to the next President, the bill staggered the new judgeships over the next decade. 11 would’ve come into effect on January 21, 2025; and then subsequent batches every two years on January 21. But President Biden vetoed it anyway—offering two arguments in his veto message, one of which is transparently inaccurate; and the other of which may well be true, but is a non-sequitur. At a deeper level, President Biden’s veto, which may succeed only in kicking this bill into the next Congress, sends the absolutely wrong message about court reform, i.e., that it is only worth doing when it also produces a short-term partisan political advantage. By that logic, court reform will never be about reforming the courts; it’ll just be about scoring political points—defeating both its deeper purpose and any chance at bipartisan political palatability.

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