President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are expected to score a big win this week. If all goes to plan, they’ll get their 235th judge on the federal bench, one more than President-elect Donald Trump seated in his first term. But the story is bigger than the total number of judges earning lifetime appointments under Biden. The president is also set to appoint a record number of Black judges, and more than half of his appointments have been people of color and women — both firsts for a sitting president. Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, talks about the significance of Biden's judicial record. And in headlines: ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought Trump, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reportedly recovering from hip replacement surgery after falling down a flight of stairs, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. has officially made contact with the Islamist rebel group that has seized control of Syria.
It's Monday, December 16th.
I'm Jayne Kostin and this is what a day.
The show that is.
Just noting that South Korea impeached and removed President Yoon Suk Yeol from office on Saturday after his attempt to declare martial law.
And now prosecutors want to interview him in advance of potential charges for perpetrating an insurrection.
I'm not saying anything about what this is making me think about.
I'm just thinking it really, really hard.
On today's show show Representative Nancy Pelosi gets hip replacement surgery in Germany.
And Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in touch with Syria's new leadership.
Let's get into it.
President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are expected to score a big win this week.
They've been rushing to confirm as many federal judges as they can before the new Congress is sworn in next year.
And if all goes to plan, Democrats will get their 235th Biden appointed judge on the federal bench in the next few days.
That's one more than President Elect Donald Trump seated in his first term.
We are still viscerally feeling the effects of those Trump appointments, especially his three Supreme Court, the end of Roe vs Wade, the end of affirmative action in college admissions, the expansion of gun rights.
A whole lot of stuff we will have to grapple with for decades.
And now we'll have to endure round two when Trump returns to office on January 20th.
So yeah, there's a reason Senate Democrats have been rushing to appoint as many judges as they can.
It's one of the few tangible things they can do in the lame duck session to mitigate the risks of a second Trump presidency, fill openings on the federal bench so Trump can't.
Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN last week that by the end of Biden's term, he'll have appointed a quarter of the entire federal judiciary.