Democrats and Republicans agree the U.S. needs more federal judges to keep up with expanding caseloads. But they haven’t taken action because of partisan differences over when to create them. Congress hasn’t authorized a new appellate judgeship since 1990 or a new permanent district court judgeship since 2003.

The culprit is an increasingly polarized and partisan judicial confirmation process. It is no coincidence that new appellate judgeships dried up soon after Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. In an environment where judicial philosophy increasingly correlates with the party of the president making the appointment, both sides have concluded that it’s better to have no new judgeships than to let a president of the other party fill the vacancies.

In 2018 a Republican-sponsored bill called the Judiciary ROOM Act would have created 52 new district judgeships, following the recommendation of the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Opposing the bill, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), now chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said it would give “52 new opportunities for the president to pack the federal courts with extremist judges.” Rep. David Cicilline (D., R.I.) called it “an effort to pack the courts with ideologically driven individuals.” Now that President Biden has been inaugurated, the roles have reversed: Republicans are pumping the brakes on new judgeships.

There’s a way out of this impasse. In 2018 Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) offered a compromise: creating the new judgeships in 2021, after the next presidential inauguration. That way, Mr. Raskin said, “neither side will know who is going to be president of the United States, and this will not proceed as a court-packing plan by one party.” Mr. Nadler agreed: “The decision to add new judges can be made on a bipartisan basis without knowing who will ultimately be in control of the nomination and confirmation process.”

The Judiciary Committee adopted Mr. Raskin’s amendment and favorably reported the Judiciary ROOM Act. In a recent hearing, Republican representatives including Ohio’s Steve Chabot and California’s Darrell Issa expressed potential support for a compromise modeled on Mr. Raskin’s proposal.

But delaying the entire batch of new judgeships—the Judicial Conference now recommends 70—to 2025 may not be enough. Lawmakers from both parties will be wary of potentially giving the opposition a windfall akin to the one in 1978, when an omnibus judgeship act gave President Jimmy Carter 145 new vacancies to fill. That might have been a factor in the 2018 ROOM Act’s failure to receive a vote by the full House. Such an approach would also risk further politicization of the judiciary by giving outsize importance to a single election.

A better course is to spread new judgeships evenly across several terms, starting immediately. A single bill creating four new judgeships a year for the next 16 years would give Mr. Biden some immediate appointments, which could be used for those districts where the caseload crisis is most acute. But it would also give an equal number of new vacancies to the winners of the next three presidential elections, most likely giving at least some appointments to presidents of both parties.

During the recent judgeships hearing, Duke Law Professor Marin K. Levy noted that “all the other times in which we have added judgeships to the courts of appeals, we have not staggered them.” But perhaps the failure to pass any judgeship bill in recent decades is evidence that the old way is no longer feasible. Delaying some of the new judgeships to future terms would give both sides a fair chance to benefit and give a judgeship bill a real chance of becoming law. That’s better than waiting another 30 years.