President Joe Biden got even more done than you thought

| 8:00 pm EST December 23, 2024
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On January 3, 2025, the 119th U.S. Congress will begin its two-year term. Seventeen days later, Donald Trump will be inaugurated for the second time. As gloomy as this news is, we can be thankful for the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration. Had Trump won a second term in 2020, we can just imagine how eight consecutive years would have played out, from the pandemic to the economy, healthcare, environmental protections, and more.

One great benefit of the last four years under the Biden-Harris administration has been the progress made with the federal bench. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he had 17 appellate court vacancies to fill, thanks to Republican efforts to block Barack Obama’s nominees. By contrast, when President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he had only two such seats to fill. To paraphrase Mitch McConnell, who engineered those blocks, nevertheless, he persisted.

As of this past Friday, the White House announced that Biden has achieved a total of 235 nominees confirmed to the federal judiciary in his first term. Not only is this, of course, 235 more federal judges than if Trump had won reelection, but it means Biden has managed to eclipse Trump, despite lacking the advantage Trump enjoyed when he took office and facing the longest 50-50 Senate in U.S. history. In fact, Biden’s 235 confirmation is the highest achieved in a single term since the Carter administration.

Friday’s latest round of confirmations—of Benjamin Cheeks and Serena Murillo to two different federal district courts in California—is also reflective of Biden’s commitment to diversity when selecting qualified judges for the federal bench. Although Biden had the opportunity to name only one individual to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to fill that role.
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The makeup of the federal judiciary is one key way that four years of Biden-Harris—rather than four more years of Trump-Pence—has made a significant difference. In a recent statement, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin pointed out that “[m]ore than one out of every four judges now serving on the judicial bench was nominated by President Biden.” As the United States prepares to step backwards into a second Trump term, the fact remains that in just one term, the Biden-Harris administration achieved a governance that was meaningful and consequential. The contrast with Trump’s second term will soon become achingly apparent, and the backlash could fuel major Democratic gains in the 2026 midterms.