Even after unanimous Senate approval, a bill addressing dire judge shortage faces uphill climb in the House
Source: CNN Politics
Published 8:00 AM EDT, Sun September 8, 2024
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.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/politics/federal-judges-vacancies-backlog-congress/index.html
A lot of the "burgeoning caseload" is due to the frivolous gaming of the system by GOP loons like Ken Paxton.
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35 years ago, HHS put all their agencies on WordPerfect (we eventually got 5.1) and when we had to deal with DOJ, they had created their own docket template that we had use (and I think before I retired, DOJ was still using some version of WordPerfect, which had been bought by Corel IIRC, where most everyone else had long-moved over to some M$ product, i.e., "Word" ). 
and eventually a pile of Tangent '386s.
In the lab even before that, we had an instrument attached to an original IBM XT.
Otherwise the office was using a VAX mini-computer and terminals that connected to it, with big old kill-those-trees line printers. The lab had a PDP/8 with a couple instruments connected to it.
