A bill to address the judicial shortage is facing difficulties in the US House of Representatives.

Washington
CNN
—

Across the country, federal courts are buckling under the weight of an ever-increasing caseload, and Congress has failed to take long-overdue action to expand the number of judges to meet the significant increase in caseloads over the past several decades.

It’s been 34 years since lawmakers last passed a comprehensive bill to increase the number of judges in lower courts. During that time, the American population has grown by 80 million. The caseload in U.S. district courts has increased by more than 30%. Last year, there were more than 724,000 pending cases before the federal bench of 677 judgeships (including about 40 to 50 vacancies) — a 72% increase in pending cases over the past decade, during which no new district seats were created.

“We really have to do all the work that litigants expect us to do, and that affects the quality of justice they receive,” Judge Mary Scriven, a federal judge in Tampa, Florida, told CNN.

The staffing shortage, she and other judges told CNN, is costing litigants time and money while undermining public confidence in the judiciary. Whether the problem will be resolved anytime soon will depend on whether the House can pass legislation in the coming weeks that would create 66 new judicial positions — 63 of them permanent — in the nation’s most congested districts. The legislation — known as the JUDGES Act, or the “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 counterpart in the House with a bipartisan sponsor, could have a long shot in that chamber, where lawmakers will have limited time to vote in September, prioritizing voting on bills that convey their policy arguments weeks before the election and a looming government shutdown they will need to avoid. The bill is not seen as a priority for many, and leadership would need to step in because Speaker Mike Johnson manages an unruly and narrow majority.

Supporters of the JUDGES Act say its chances of passage will decline significantly after the election, when it becomes clear which party will appoint the first round of new judges assigned by the act.

“That uncertainty — no one knows for sure what’s going to happen in this election or any other — should help motivate people to get this bill through the House and then get it done this month,” said Jonathan Hafen, national president of the Federal Bar Association, which sponsored the bill.

If it doesn’t pass, the situation will become even more dire for the federal courts’ busiest courts. Semi-retired judges, known as senior judges, who helped shoulder the extra burden will age and no longer be able to contribute. And the burnout factor is affecting the amount of work newly retired senior judges are willing to take on, leaving active judges scrambling to fill the gaps.

“It just makes the workload relentless,” said Judge Timothy Corrigan, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, which covers Tampa and the rest of Central Florida and would receive five new judicial positions under the bill. “You issue opinions, you conduct trials, you do what you’re supposed to do, but as soon as you finish one thing, there are five more that need your attention. It never ends.”

Litigants will have to wait even longer to resolve their cases. For defendants held in jail ahead of trial, that means more months in custody before a jury considers the charges against them. And in civil lawsuits, litigants may feel pressured to resolve cases that would otherwise go to trial because of the costs associated with seemingly endless litigation.

“If a panel does not have enough judges, it cannot hear the parties’ cases in a timely manner,” said Judge Kimberly Mueller, chief judge of the federal trial court for the Eastern District of California.

Mueller’s district, which covers 34 counties in California’s Central Valley, has just six active district judges to serve an area whose population has grown from nearly 2.5 million in 1990, when Congress last passed a comprehensive judicial expansion bill, to nearly 8.5 million.

Courts prioritize disposing of criminal cases, as required by the Speedy Trial Act. Yet the median time from criminal filing to resolution is 33 months in California’s Eastern District.

“Someone could spend months, if not years, in a local jail in pretrial detention if they are detained, waiting for the outcome of their case,” Mueller said. For prosecutors, the delay risks losing witnesses and their memories.

The JUDGES Act would add four additional judgeships to her district, one at a time in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031. The bill was developed based on recommendations from the Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary’s policymaking body, which took into account caseload statistics as well as other factors, such as the geography of the judicial district, the availability of investigative judges who can help with the work, and factors that can make it more difficult to conduct litigation, such as the frequent need for language interpreters.

“We go to great lengths to make sure that every judicial appointment recommendation we make is reasonable, defensible and based on actual workload needs,” said U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Moritz, chairwoman of the Judicial Conference’s Judicial Resources Committee’s subcommittee on court statistics.

In some districts, divisions with increasingly busy schedules don’t have dedicated judges, meaning there’s scrambling to allocate caseloads to judges in other parts of the district. For example, there’s no sitting judge in the Ocala division of the Florida Middle District — home to The Villages, a retirement community that has grown significantly in recent years.

“This community deserves to have a full-time district judge sitting in the courthouse in Ocala, handling these cases, allowing the community to come and observe and so on,” Corrigan said. “The fact that we can’t provide that right now is just not the quality of federal justice that you would expect.”

The bill’s biggest backers in the Senate — Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who first introduced the bill in 2020, and Delaware Sen. Chris Coon, its first Democratic co-sponsor — are pushing for quick passage of the bill in the House in September, given that the November elections could discourage the losing party from supporting it.

But even the House version’s co-sponsor, Rep. Hank Johnson, expressed skepticism about that timeline. Pointing to the government spending legislation the House will consider next month, the Georgia Democrat told CNN that “I think it’s most likely to happen in the lame duck session.”

Supporters of the bill are reaching out to both House leadership and members of the House whose congressional districts would receive the additional judicial vacancies on their courts, a Senate aide involved in the campaign told CNN.

To win the broad support that allowed the bill to pass both the Senate Judiciary Committee—the scene of some of the most bitter partisan battles in that chamber—and the Senate without any opposition, the bill’s architects had to stretch out the period over which judges would be added to the various district courts. The bill assigns new judges for a 12-year period.

“There is a strong possibility that both parties will have their turn in the White House at that time, and all judicial nominations are still subject to the Senate confirmation process,” another Senate aide involved in the legislative effort told CNN.

CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this report.