Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit, is sworn in to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on pending judicial nominations on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 28, 2021.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
President Joe Biden announced Friday that he is nominating federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
Jackson, currently on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, “is one of our nation’s brightest legal minds and will be an exceptional Justice,” Biden said in a tweet.
Biden made the decision on whom to nominate by Thursday night, NBC had reported.
The president had vowed to pick a Black woman to succeed liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who plans to retire in the summer at the end of the court’s current term. Biden made that promise years earlier as a presidential candidate.
If successful, Biden’s nomination will at least temporarily avoid any further erosion of the high court’s already-diminished liberal flank, who are outnumbered 6-3 by conservatives.
Just five women — Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett — have served on the Supreme Court. Only two Black men, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, have ever been appointed to the bench. No Black women have previously sat on the high court.
Biden was apparently still deliberating his options on Thursday: White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that afternoon that Biden had still not reached a “final final” decision and that “no job offer has been made.”
Psaki assured that “we are still on track to make an announcement before the end of the month,” as Biden had promised, while noting “we have to do a lot of things around here at the same time.”
The president has been deeply engaged in managing the crisis over Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, which began earlier this week amid an international outcry.
The 51-year-old Jackson — young by the court’s modern standards — was confirmed last year to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a 53-44 vote. All 50 Democrats supported Brown’s nomination, along with Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.
Jackson previously clerked for Breyer, and her judicial record has garnered plaudits from progressives.
Multiple outlets reported that Biden was also considering South Carolina federal Judge J. Michelle Childs and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger up until the final days of the selection process.
Due to Republicans tossing the 60-vote filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominees during the Trump administration, the 50-50 split in the Senate gives Democrats enough power to confirm Biden’s eventual pick without any GOP votes. Vice President Kamala Harris would be the tiebreaking vote, if required.
That narrow majority was briefly clouded in early February by the news that Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke.
But within two weeks, Lujan released a video statement assuring that he would make a full recovery and return to the Senate to consider, and vote on, Biden’s nominee.
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