While the White House sought to portray a deliberative process, few in Washington expected the president to choose anyone other than the appellate court judge.
As President Biden weighed his options for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, he scoured the records and backgrounds of his finalists and was struck by the work of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. A former public defender, she had served on a commission aimed at reducing sentencing disparities. As Biden saw it, Jackson had compassion and firsthand experience understanding the human consequences of judicial decisions. What’s more, he had gotten to know her and concluded her consensus-building background was in the mold of the justice she would replace, the retiring Stephen G. Breyer. which senior White House officials laid out in a private call with Democratic senators shortly before Friday’s public announcement, detailed by two people with direct knowledge of the conversation — will ground the White House’s public case for Jackson as she faces confirmation in a bitterly-divided Senate. If confirmed, Jackson,51, who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, will make history as the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s most powerful court in its nearly 233-year history. The White House took pains both publicly and in private to portray a truly deliberative process, with people associated with other finalists receiving requests from administration officials as late as the middle of this week to provide background material. But ultimately, few in Washington expected the president to choose someone other than Jackson, who had been considered for the high court since at least 2016 and was long seen as the leading candidate for an eventual vacancy during the Biden administration. “She listens. She looks people in the eye — lawyers, defendants, victims and families,” Biden said from the Cross Hall of the White House Friday as he introduced Jackson as his Supreme Court pick. “She strives to ensure that everyone understands why she made a decision, what the law is, and what it means to them. She strives to be fair, to get it right, to do justice.” Biden nominates Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court Biden was particularly drawn to Jackson’s experience as Breyer’s clerk, according to one White House official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The president has deep affection for Breyer and wanted to replace him with someone in his mold, the official said, emphasizing Jackson not only worked directly for Breyer, but she also served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission like her former boss. “He loved that she was Breyer’s clerk,” the White House official said. But even if the choice of Jackson seemed inevitable, the path to her formal nomination Friday was fraught with some unexpected turns. Most prominently, a spiraling conflict in Eastern Europe — culminating this week with Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine — dominated the news and consumed much of Biden’s time.
