President Biden Withdraws Nomination of Indian American Judge Vijay Shanker, a Trump Nominee
- The Senate did not take up Shankar’s nomination while Trump was in office and the Republican Party had the majority.
In his first fortnight in office, 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, has been extremely busy. He has signed more than 40 executive orders — an “opening-days blitz … essentially compressing 100 days into 10,” to quote The New York Times and has outlined the most liberal agenda in a generation.
Among the many reversals of his predecessor’s decisions, Biden’s latest attempt to clean house, is the cancellation of Trump’s nomination of Vijay Shanker to be a judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in Washington.
The White House on Thursday informed the United States Senate that it was withdrawing his nomination, which was made in June, news reports said.
The Senate did not take up Shanker’s nomination while Trump was in office and the Republican Party had the majority.
His was one of 32 nominations, 17 of them for judges that were held over from the Trump administration and pulled back by Biden.
While many political appointees, including prosecutors, leave voluntarily when an administration changes or are fired, judges, appointed from a president’s pool of ideological soulmates or party loyalists, keep their positions.
Trump had first announced Shankar’s nomination in June 2020 when he was serving as Senior Litigation Counsel in the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, and as Deputy Chief of the Appellate Section.
He investigated and prosecuted violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and related offenses and oversaw 30 lawyers who handle federal criminal appeals and draft Supreme Court briefs.
Shanker was simultaneously an adjunct associate professor at the Washington College of Law of the American University.
Before joining the Department of Justice in 2012, Shanker was in private practice with the Washington, D.C., offices of Mayer Brown, LLC and Covington and Burling, LLP.
Upon graduation from law school, Shanker served as a law clerk to Judge Chester J. Straub on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Shanker completed his bachelors, cum laude, from Duke University and his Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia, School of Law, where he served as a Notes Editor for the Virginia Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.