Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court’s three liberal justices, plans on retiring at the end of the current term.
The 83-year-old’s departure will give President Joe Biden the opportunity to nominate a replacement and potential solidify a liberal foothold on the court for decades to come.
Biden has repeatedly pledge to nominate a Black woman.
“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we, in fact, get everyone represented,” he said in February 2020.
No Black woman has ever served on the court.
One potential candidate is federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer law clerk.
NBC News reports:
After serving as a district court judge in Washington, Jackson was nominated by Biden for a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and confirmed by the Senate in mid-June. She succeeded Merrick Garland, who left the appeals court to become Biden’s attorney general.
Leondra Kruger, a justice on the California Supreme Court, is also considered a frontrunner for the role. She was previously deputy solicitor general in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Meanwhile, The Associated Press reports that Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who made a crucial endorsement of Biden in 2020, has a preferred candidate: U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs. Childs has spent her judicial career in South Carolina and was recently nominated to fill a DC appeals court seat.
“President Biden’s nominee will receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Wednesday afternoon.
Because the GOP created a filibuster carveout for Supreme Court nominations in order to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Democrats need a simple majority to approve Biden’s pick.
Breyer was nominated to the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. NPR adds background on his legacy:
Breyer, though not a household name, has been an important figure on the Supreme Court for more than a quarter century.
Perhaps his most publicly well-known decision came in 2016 when he wrote the court’s abortion opinion striking down a Texas law, copied in other states, that closed nearly half the clinics in the state without any demonstrable safety justification. The decision dispassionately dissected and demolished the state’s claim that its motive was to protect women’s health and safety. It had no majestic language, but its effect was profound in reaffirming the rights of women to terminate pregnancies.
In many respects, Breyer’s monuments were not so much the decisions that he authored as the decisions that he influenced. Behind the scenes, he pushed and prodded his fellow justices for consensus on everything from Obamacare to affirmative action in higher education.
The New York Times adds:
Justice Breyer’s opinions have been those of a moderate liberal, marked by deference to experts, the ad hoc balancing of competing interests and alertness to fundamental fairness. His goal, he said, was to reinforce democracy and to supply workable legal principles for a sprawling and diverse nation.
He has been more likely to vote against criminal defendants than other liberal justices. On the other hand, as the years progressed, he has grown increasingly hostile to the death penalty.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
