A group of federal judges are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about diversity on the bench. Judge Carlton Reeves was one of the few judges to publicly criticize the Trump admin's lack of diverse nominees: buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetil
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Reeves is testifying first and jumps right in, highlighting stats on the lack of diverse nominees over the past four years and examples of courts that don't reflect the demographics of communities they serve. He says the courts face a "crisis of legitimacy" on the present course
Worth noting that the Biden has yet to announce his first judicial nominee — Trump's first nominee (Judge Amul Thapar for the 6th Circuit) was announced on March 21, Obama's first nominee (Judge David Hamilton for the 7th Circuit) was announced March 17
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Judge Frank Bailey of the federal bankruptcy court in Massachusetts points out that most people's contact with the federal courts is via bankruptcy proceedings, and those judges are appointed by federal circuit judges, so there's a trickle-down effect re: diversity
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Judge James Ho (the lone GOP appointee on the panel) testifies about the importance of equal opportunity and shares that he's been the target of racist hate mail, but he also pushes back on weighting the selection of judges based on race
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Ho says that it "would be profoundly offensive and un-American to tell the world that you're restricting a judgeship to members of only one race" — the judge didn't specifically refer to Biden's pledge to choose a Black woman for SCOTUS, but that came to mind when he said it
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Judge Bernice Donald: "We as judges will always follow the law but ... justice is informed by our perspectives. And diversity does not mean that individual decisiosns are driven by our life experieces, rather, they add different angles from which to look at an issue or question."
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