President Joe Biden is expected to nominate his choice for the next U.S. Supreme Court justice by the end of February, and he has narrowed his list of candidates to three Black women as promised.
Professor Nancy Maveety, a Supreme Court expert and chair of the Political Science Department at Tulane University, said Biden’s nomination of a Black woman to the high court is significant in two ways.
“First, it will represent an appointment breaking another barrier based on race and gender, further diversifying the High Bench so that it ‘looks like America,’ ” said Maveety, author of Picking Judges, a book that examines the dynamics of screening and choosing judicial nominees and the confirmation process.
The appointment also continues a long practice of presidents making appointments to represent certain demographic interests—whether those be regional, religious or ethnic—as well as to reflect or cultivate the power of certain constituencies in the party’s electoral base.
She likened the move to President Lyndon Johnson’s appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, and the importance of Black voters to the Democratic Party’s electoral success. President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, addressed the Republican party’s concerns about the gender gap in voting, Maveety said.
As for the confirmation process, Maveety said it will be partisan and polarized, though not as intense as recent confirmations. “Because Biden’s nominee will presumably replace one liberal-voting justice with another and given that the Court’s current ‘liberal bloc’ is also a minority, the political stakes of this appointment are much lower than in the case of a swing seat.”
Biden’s top candidates are said to be Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Leondra Kruger of the California State Supreme Court and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs of South Carolina.
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