Opinion | Biden deserves kudos for diverse judges. But White men still dominate.

Biden also deserves praise for improving diversity on the federal bench. More than 76 percent of Biden’s have been women (including the first Black woman to be Supreme Court justice), compared the roughly 42 percent of Barack Obama’s appointees and only 24 percent of Donald Trump’s.

Even more stunning, while 68 percent of Obama’s judges and 84 percent of Trump’s were White, that’s true of only 32 percent of Biden’s as of July 1. When it comes to Black judges, Biden (28 percent) outpaces Obama (18 percent) and underscores Trump’s abysmal record (less than 4 percent). Same goes for Biden’s record on appointing Hispanic and Asian Americans judges. Overall, about 65 percent of Biden’s nominees are people of color.

To put this into perspective, Trump nominated zero Black judges to the Supreme Court or circuit courts out of 56 appointments. Was there not a single Black person acceptable to the Trump administration? It’s hard to believe merit ranked high on Trump’s list of criteria, considering the slew of utterly unqualified White candidates he put forward.

Biden has also nominated roughly 30 former public defenders, far more than any other president. Indeed, Ketanji Brown Jackson is the only Supreme Court justice to have worked as a public defender.

Despite Biden’s record, the federal bench as a whole remains appallingly low on diversity. A recent report from the American Bar Association found, for example, “Of the 1,088 sitting judges on federal district courts, there were 48 Black women as of July 1, 2022. That’s just 4.4% of all the district court judges. California had six Black female judges in district court, while Illinois and New York each had four.” In 27 states, there is not a single Black woman on the federal bench. It’s worse at the circuit court level, where only 3.4 percent of appeals court judges are Black women. “Six circuit courts had none,” the ABA report found.

As the report makes clear, the judiciary is so overwhelmingly male and White that it will take decades to reach anything approaching a fair reflection of the country. Thanks to Biden’s effort, “the percentage of Blacks on the federal bench rose slightly — from 9.5% in 2020 to 11% in 2022. . . . Meanwhile, 7.7% of federal judges in 2022 were Hispanic — up slightly from 6.5% in 2020.” Meanwhile, less than 4 percent of federal judges are Asian American (a small increase under Biden) and no Asian American has been appointed to the Supreme Court. And the gender balance looks like the U.S. workforce from 1960: “The percentage of female federal judges grew from 27% in 2020 to 30% in 2022.”

One takeaway from these statistics: Diversity is one of many good reasons to expand the federal bench. As Bloomberg Law reports, “Despite years of requests, the last time Congress gave…