By Nate Raymond and Dan Burns

(Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday vetoed legislation to add 66 new judges to the nation’s understaffed federal courts, a once largely bipartisan measure that would have been the first major expansion of the system federal judiciary since 1990.

The JUDGES Act, initially supported by many in both parties, would have increased the number of trial judges in 25 federal district courts in 13 states, including California, Florida and Texas, in six waves every two years until 2035.

Hundreds of judges appointed by presidents of both parties took the rare step of publicly advocating for the bill, saying federal caseloads have increased more than 30 percent since Congress last passed a bill. law aimed at completely expanding judicial power.

But the outgoing Democratic president made good on his veto threat issued two days before the bill passed the Republican-led House of Representatives on December 12, by a vote of 236 to 173.

In a message to the Senate formally rejecting the bill, Biden said it was “hastily” creating new judge positions without addressing the key questions of whether new judges were needed and how they would be distributed across the board. national scale.

Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said in response that the veto was “partisan politics at its worst.”

By staggering the new judge terms over three presidential administrations, the bill’s sponsors hoped to sidestep lawmakers’ long-standing concerns about creating new vacancies that a president from an opposing party could fill.

It received unanimous approval from the Democratic-led Senate in August. But the bill remained in the Republican-led House and only came up for a vote after Republican President-elect Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 election and the opportunity to appoint the first group of 25 judges.

That sparked accusations from top House Democrats, who began abandoning the measure, that their Republican colleagues had broken a central promise of the legislation by having lawmakers approve the bill when no one knew who would appoint the first wave of judges.

Had the bill passed, Trump could have filled 22 permanent and three temporary judgeships over a four-year period, in addition to the more than 100 judicial appointments he is already expected to make.

These appointments would allow Trump to further strengthen his influence over the justice system. He made 234 judicial appointments during his first term, including three to the United States Supreme Court’s conservative majority (6-3).

Biden on Friday surpassed Trump’s total number of judicial appointments with 235, although he has appointed fewer appellate judges and just one justice to the U.S. Supreme Court during his term.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Dan Burns in New York; editing by Himani Sarkar and Nicholas Yong)