The inauguration of President Joe Biden couldn’t come fast enough for one federal judge. Roughly ninety minutes after the president was sworn in, District Judge Victoria Roberts wrote to him announcing her plans to step down.
Roberts has served as a judge on the Eastern District Court of Michigan since 1998. She congratulated the president and vice president and announced that she would be taking up senior status or start semi-retirement on February 24. This opens a court vacancy for the Biden Administration to fill.
Aside from Roberts, five other federal judges with lifetime appointments have also announced plans to retire or semi-retire, according to data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. That’s in addition to eight other judges that have already announced plans to step down since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Two more U.S. district judges also recently announced plans to take senior status.
Although most judges have personal reasons for retiring or semi-retiring, it’s safe to say for most of the part that the timing isn’t coincidental. Most of them obviously wanted Biden, not Trump, to pick their replacements.
President Bill Clinton appointed eight of the judges who have retired, and Barack Obama appointed two. So it would make sense that they want another Democrat president to pick their replacement. But five of those judges were appointed by George Bush.
This doesn’t imply that federal judges wait until a president of the same party as the one that nominated them is in power to retire. But it’s a motivating factor for most. It’s more of a practice for Supreme Court nominees, where justices do their best to time their departure so the opposite party doesn’t replace them. Most Democrat judges may have taken President Trump’s criticism and decided not to let him replace them.
Biden hasn’t nominated any judges yet. However, his team has written to democratic senators to provide judicial nominee recommendations for the vacant district court positions as soon as possible. There are currently about forty-six vacancies the president has to fill, and the numbers keep growing.
President Joe Biden has a lot of work to do if he intends to counter the Trump administration’s impact on the nation’s courts. Thanks to a Republican majority in the Senate, President Trump filled more than 230 lifetime judges’ vacancies. That’s more people than Obama (175), Bush (206), and Clinton (204) filled in their first terms.
However, many of the judges Trump appointed were a specific mold; they were primarily white, male, and right-wing ideologues. President Biden has promised to bring more diversity into the courts, including appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court.
