President Barack Obama is moving at a historic pace to try to diversify the nation’s federal judiciary. Nearly three of every four people he has gotten confirmed to the federal bench are women or minorities. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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He is the first president who hasn’t selected a majority of white males for lifetime judgeships.
More than 70 percent of Obama’s confirmed judicial nominees during his first two years were “non-traditional,” or nominees who were not white males. That far exceeds the percentages in the two-term administrations of Bill Clinton (48.1 percent) and George W. Bush (32.9 percent), according to Sheldon Goldman, author of the authoritative book “Picking Federal Judges.”
“It is an absolutely remarkable diversity achievement,” said Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is only counting judges once, even if they fit more than one category.
The White House recently has been touting its efforts to diversify the federal bench during Obama’s tenure, now approaching three years in office.
The president won Senate confirmation of the first Latina to the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. And with the confirmation of Justice Elena Kagan, he increased the number of women on the high court to three for the first time. The Obama administration also nominated and won confirmation of the first openly gay man to a federal judgeship: former Clinton administration official J. Paul Oetken, to an opening in New York City.
“All of us can be proud of President Obama for taking this critical step to break down another barrier and increase diversity in the federal judiciary,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said upon Oetken’s confirmation.
The first openly homosexual federal judge was Deborah A. Batts in New York City, a lesbian nominated by Clinton in 1994.
Of the 98 Obama nominees confirmed to date, the administration says 21 percent are African-American, 11 percent are Hispanic, 7 percent are Asian-American and almost half — 47 percent — are women. By comparison, of the 322 judges confirmed during George W. Bush’s presidency, 18 percent were minorities and 22 percent were female. Of the 372 judges confirmed during Clinton’s terms, 25 percent were minorities and 29 percent were women. In these figures, some judges fit into more than one category.
Last week, the Senate confirmed the first African-American woman to sit on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Bernice Donald. Earlier, she was the first African-American woman elected as a judge in Tennessee, the first appointed as federal bankruptcy judge in the nation and first confirmed as a U.S. district judge in Tennessee.
Obama also has doubled the number of Asian-Americans sitting on the federal bench, including adding Denny Chin to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York as the only active Asian federal appeals court judge. There currently are 14 Asian-American federal judges on the 810-judge roster.
“It’s really amazing,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who wrote about the increasing diversity on the federal bench during Obama’s administration in an article in the Washington University Law Review. “Obama has nominated as many as were sitting on the bench when he was inaugurated.”
For more than 140 years, there were no females or minorities among the nation’s federal judges.
