Even after unanimous Senate approval, a bill addressing dire judge shortage faces uphill climb in the House
By Tierney Sneed, CNN
Washington (CNN) — Across the country, federal courts are buckling under an ever-increasing caseload in the absence of long-awaited congressional action that would add judges to match a significant growth in litigation over the last several decades.
It’s been 34 years since lawmakers last passed a comprehensive bill increasing the number of judges on lower courts. In that period, the American population has grown by 80 million. The number of filings in US district courts increased by more than 30%. In the past year, there were more than 724,000 pending cases being handled by a federal trial bench made up of 677 judgeships (including roughly 40-50 vacancies) – a 72% increase in pending cases over the last decade, during which, no new district seats have been created.
“We really are pressed to get all of the work done that litigants demand of us, and it affects the quality of the justice that they receive,” Judge Mary Scriven, a federal judge in Tampa, Florida, told CNN.
The staffing shortfall, she and other judges told CNN, is costing litigants time and money, while undermining public confidence in the judiciary. Whether it is addressed any time soon will depend on whether the House can pass in the coming weeks legislation that would create 66 new judgeships – 63 of them permanent – to the country’s most overburdened court districts. The legislation – known as the known as the JUDGES Act or “Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved” Act – was quietly approved by the Senate without any opposition just before the August recess.
The bill, which has a House counterpart with bipartisan sponsorship, could face long odds in that chamber where lawmakers will have limited floor time in September, a priority to vote on messaging bills that drive home their political arguments in the weeks before the election and a government shutdown looming they’ll need to avert. The legislation isn’t seen as a top priority for many, and leadership would need to step in as Speaker Mike Johnson is managing an unruly and narrow majority.
Supporters of the JUDGES Act say that the odds of it passing shrink considerably after the election, when it will become clear which party will get to appoint the first round of new judges allotted by the bill.
“That uncertainty – nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen in this election, or any other – that should help to motivate people to get this passed on the House side, and, then, get it done this month,” said Jonathan Hafen, national president of the Federal Bar Association, which has been advocating in favor of the bill.
If it is not passed, the situation for the most stretched federal courts will only grow more dire. The semi-retired judges known as senior judges that have helped carry the extra load will age out of being able to contribute. And a burnout factor is affecting the amount of work that newly retired senior judges are willing to take on, leaving active-status judges scrambling to fill the gaps.
“It just makes the workload relentless,” said Judge Timothy Corrigan, the chief judge of the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, which covers Tampa and the rest of central Florida, and would receive five new judgeships under the bill. “You’re issuing opinions, you’re having trials, you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, but as soon as you finish one thing, there’s five others that need your attention. It never stops.”
Litigants will have to wait even longer for their cases to be resolved. For defendants being held in jail before trial, that means more months of detention before a jury ever considers the charges against them. And in civil lawsuits, the parties may feel pressure to settle cases that otherwise would have gone to trial because of the cost of paying for seemingly never-ending litigation.
“If the bench doesn’t have capacity, the bench can’t hear those litigants’ cases in a timely way,” said Judge Kimberly Mueller, chief judge of the Eastern District of California’s federal trial court.
‘Not the quality of federal justice’
Mueller’s district — stretching across 34 counties in California’s Central Valley – has just six-active district judges to handle an area that has grown in population from nearly 2.5 million in 1990, when Congress last passed a comprehensive judicial expansion bill, to almost 8.5 million.
Courts prioritize the resolution of criminal cases, as required under the Speedy Trial Act. But still, the median time between the filing of a criminal felony case and its resolution is 33 months in California’s Eastern District.
“Someone can spend many months, if not years, in a local jail in pre-trial detention if they’re detained, waiting to know the outcome of their case,” Mueller said. For prosecutors, the delay risks losing witnesses and their memories.
Under the JUDGES Act, her district would get four additional judgeships, added one by one in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031. The bill was crafted based on the recommendations of the Judicial Conference, the policymaking body of the federal judiciary, which looked both at case load statistics and other circumstances, like the geography of a court district, the availability of magistrate judges that can help with the work, and factors that could make litigation more complex, like a frequent need for language interpreters.
“We take very great care to make sure that every single judgeship recommendation that we make is reasonable, and it’s defensible and it’s based on the actual workload needs,” said US Circuit Judge Nancy Moritz, who chairs the Judicial Statistics subcommittee of Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Resources.
In some court districts, divisions with increasingly busy dockets don’t have dedicated judges, meaning there is a scramble to assign out the case load to judges elsewhere in the district. For instance, there is no sitting judge in the Florida Middle District’s Ocala division – home to The Villages, a retirement community that has grown dramatically in recent years.
“That community deserves a full-time district judge sitting in the Ocala courthouse handling those cases, allowing the community to come in and watch and so forth,” Corrigan said. “The fact that we’re unable to provide that right now is just not the quality of federal justice that you would hope that we would be able to provide.”
A push for quick passage in the House
The bill’s top Senate supporters – Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who first introduced the legislation in 2020, and Delaware Sen. Chris Coon, its initial Democratic cosponsor – are pushing for quick passage in the House this September, given how November’s election could disincentivize the losing party from supporting it.
However, even a co-sponsor of the House version, Rep. Hank Johnson, expressed skepticism of that timeline. Pointing to the government spending legislation the House will be working on next month, the Georgia Democrat told CNN that “I think it’s most likely that it’ll take place during the lame duck session.”
The bill’s supporters are reaching out both to House leadership and the House members whose congressional districts would see judgeships added to their courthouses, a Senate aide involved in the push told CNN.
To get the broad support that allowed the legislation to pass both the Senate Judiciary Committee – the site of some of the most pitched, party-line battles in that chamber – and the Senate floor without any opposition, the bill’s architects had to stretch out the time period over which judges would be added to the various district courts. The bill allocates new judges over 12 years.
“Chances are good that both parties will have a turn in the White House at some point over that span of time, and all judicial nominations are still subject to the confirmation process in the Senate,” another Senate aide involved in the legislative push told CNN.
CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this report.
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