Joe Biden – or, let’s be honest, whoever is pulling his strings – is certainly trying to throw as many roadblocks as he can under the incoming Trump administration. To some extent, this is always what happens when there is a change in the party affiliation of the man seated at the Resolute Desk, but sometimes people get carried away. Some of us remember the childish crap Clinton administration staffers got up to when handing the keys to the White House off to the incoming Bush administration; breaking all of the “W” keys off of computer keyboards, for instance.
Whoever is pulling Joe Biden’s strings, though, is causing more than a few raised eyebrows. The supposed President Biden’s veto of a bill increasing the number of federal judges, a bill that passed the Senate unanimously, has at least one Senate Democrat expressing his disappointment.
A top ally of President Biden is “disappointed” after he vetoed a bill that would have increased the number of federal judges currently serving.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who served as a campaign co-chair for both of Biden’s recent presidential campaigns, stressed that he and his Republican colleague Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., kept bipartisanship top of mind when crafting the bill.
“I am disappointed by this outcome, for my own state and for the federal judges throughout the country struggling under the burden of ever-higher caseloads. I’ve worked on this bill for years, and thanks to tireless bipartisan effort with Senator Young, it made it to the president’s desk. It’s highly unfortunate that it will not become law,” Coons said in a statement on Tuesday.
Of course, if this is something that Senator Coons (and Senator Young) really feel needs done, they can introduce it again when the new Congress is seated. But as it happens, there’s more behind the veto.
He then put the blame on House Republicans for the bill’s ultimate failure, however, for voting on it after the 2024 election.
“Senator Young and I took pains to make this a nonpartisan process, structuring the JUDGES Act so that Congress could pass the bill before any of us – Republican or Democrat – knew who would occupy the White House in 2025 and therefore nominate the new federal judges,” Coons said.
“The Senate did its part by passing the bill unanimously in August; the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, however, waited for election results before moving the bill forward. As a result, the White House is now vetoing this bill.”
Now, politics is a dirty business, and has been at least since Meletus of Athens accused Socrates of heresy and demanded the death penalty. Now, old Meletus himself was executed in turn by a remorseful population of Athens, which should serve as a cautionary tale for petty, vindictive politicians everywhere. In this case, though, the House Republicans did what we can expect Republican voters would have wanted them to do, and that is to prevent the appointment of a substantial portion of the federal judiciary by (shudder) Kamala “Queen of Word Salads” Harris.
This is partisan politics, and preventing such an eventuality is up there with the one thing we can really be grateful to Mitch McConnell for, and that is that Merrick Garland will never sit on the Supreme Court.
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Here’s where it gets interesting: Will Senator Coons reintroduce this bill now that we are on the eve of the premiere of “Trump II, This Time It’s Personal?” Will Senator Coons, a partisan Democrat, take a chance on Donald Trump appointing all of these new federal judges?
It’s as I’m constantly saying: Principles or principals? Chris Coon’s actions in the next Congress will speak volumes about which of those he values.
