![]() ![]() ![]() The following list of potential Biden nominees was compiled from multiple sources. ![]() President Franklin Roosevelt named two senators (Hugo Black and Jimmy Byrnes), two US attorneys general (Robert Jackson and Frank Murphy), one US solicitor general (Stanley Reed), one chair of a federal agency (William Douglas), and one law professor (Felix Frankfurter) to the Court. The modern practice of almost exclusively placing sitting judges on the Supreme Court is fairly new. If Biden wishes to follow this model, he could pick someone like Justice Leondra Kruger of the California Supreme Court, who is considered to be another frontrunner for Breyer’s seat.īiden could also potentially look to other high-ranking government officials or even prominent lawyers and legal scholars to fill the vacant seat. So Reagan turned to state courts, appointing a mid-level Arizona appeals court judge named Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. Reagan promised to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, but when a vacancy opened up early in Reagan’s presidency, women of all racial backgrounds were underrepresented on the federal bench, and conservative women who shared Reagan’s political views were especially underrepresented. Bettmann Archiveīut Biden could also take a page from President Ronald Reagan’s playbook. O’Connor was Reagan’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and the first woman to serve on the Court. President Ronald Reagan shows then-Arizona Judge Sandra O’Connor the way into the Rose Garden before meeting at the White House on July 15, 1981. Indeed, one of Biden’s appointees, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is widely considered to be one of two frontrunners for the Supreme Court vacancy. ![]() So, if Biden follows the common practice of choosing a sitting federal appellate judge as his nominee, he will almost certainly choose someone he’s already elevated to an appeals court. Rawlinson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is in her late 60s. But the youngest Black woman who served as a federal appellate judge when Biden took office, Judge Johnnie B. Presidents typically prefer to name justices who are, at most, in their early- to mid-50s so that their nominee will still have a long career ahead of them. Biden has doubled that number, placing five more Black women on the federal appellate bench. But, when Biden took office, only five of the nearly 300 sitting federal appellate judges were Black women, according to the Federal Judicial Center. Of the nine current justices, only Justice Elena Kagan did not. Nearly all recent justices previously served on a federal appeals court before getting promoted to the high court. And they were even more so before Biden took office. And Black women aren’t just unrepresented on the Supreme Court, they are also massively underrepresented on the federal bench. Only two African Americans, Justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, have served on the nation’s highest court, and only one woman of color has been a justice - Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is Latina. With Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement opening a seat on the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden has a chance to fulfill a campaign promise to name a Black woman to the Court for the first time. ![]()
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