Even though the conservative movement has prioritized Supreme Court fights over nearly all other forms of political battle, activists in that universe aren’t planning a vicious political fight over President Biden’s pick to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, Politico reports. Conservative judicial groups said they viewed the current landscape as less than conducive to a successful bare-knuckled confirmation fight. The 83-year-old justice's retirement was long expected, Republicans do not control the Senate and, most importantly, a new justice would not shift the court’s ideological balance, let alone its majority.
After news broke that Breyer would be stepping down in the coming months, conservative judicial operatives were surprised by the timing of the disclosure They were not the only ones caught off guard. A source close to several justices said that after the story was leaked, Breyer himself reached out to colleagues to express regret about how the process unfolded. On the 2020 campaign trail, Biden promised that he would nominate a Black woman to the highest court. Among the names that have been floated include Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who replaced Attorney General Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Leondra Kruger, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, J. Michelle Childs, a District Court judge in South Carolina, and Leslie Abrams Gardner, a District Court judge in Georgia.
Comments