Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer confirmed his plans to retire on January 27, 2022, giving President Biden his first Supreme Court nomination. While the Biden administration has kept all interviews under wraps, with plans to announce the Court pick on March 1, Biden has promised that his Supreme Court pick “will be the first Black woman ever nominated.”
This will be the fourth Supreme Court Justice nominated in the past five years. Supreme Court Justice is a position that historically has been a seat held for life, though Justices are 2.6 times more likely to retire “if the incumbent president is of the same party as the president who nominated the justice to the Court, and if the incumbent president is in the first two years of a four-year presidential term.”
Though still unconfirmed, the top three likely picks according to NPR, CNN, Fox News, and other outlets are “federal Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Krueger and federal District Judge J. Michelle Childs.” Summarized from NPR profiles, here are the quick facts about each of the potential candidates.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is a 51 year old circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals. She has done work in reducing penalties for crack cocaine to match the penalties for powder cocaine, which had allowed a disproportionate number of black and brown drug offenders to receive much higher sentences than their white counterparts. She has written more than 500 opinions, some of them over 100 pages. She favors rhetoric used in Supreme Court doctrines, saying that systemically racist and systematic bias “are not terms that I use in the law” and that courts look to prove “discriminatory intent, discriminatory impact, in some cases, retaliation” but not systemic racism.
Leondra Kruger is a 45 year old California Supreme Court justice. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Court justice, also had experience in a state court prior to her Supreme Court seat. Kruger applies a “rigorous analysis regardless of what the result favors” with UC Berkeley and Hastings law schools concluding that Kruger’s opinions are “not aligned with any ideological coalition” without a partisan agenda. Kruger has seen and voted on death penalty cases, most of which result in a unanimous decision to uphold the penalty, though there are some high profile cases where the court decided, also unanimously, to reverse the death sentence. Kruger’s approach to law is not literal, as she believes statutes “should not be blindly and literally applied” and she aims for “narrow changes in the law rather than expansive rulings.”
J. Michelle Childs is a 55 year old Judge of the US District Court for the District of South Carolina. Her father was a victim of gun violence, and she has spoken about the effects of gun violence on children in America. Her early career involved representing employers or employees in disputes, which caused some members of the Democratic Party to accuse her of union-busting, though she is endorsed by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States. Former President Obama nominated her for the federal trial bench, and she was unanimously rated as “well qualified” and confirmed. If confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, she and Amy Coney Barrett would be the only Justices to not graduate from Harvard or Yale.
Once announced, it takes a nominee between two to three months to be confirmed by the Senate. Biden will be looking to confirm the Supreme Court Justice before the 2022 midterms, as the Democratic majority in the Senate secures the 50 necessary votes.
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