Biden to nominate first Black woman on Supreme Court

Washington: As President Joe Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, several leading candidates for the coveted seat on the nation’s highest court have emerged.

The Democratic president has said he will reveal his choice by the end of February, and has interviewed three potential nominees so far according to US media. The White House has been tight-lipped about the search for a justice to replace Justice Stephen Breyer, 83, a liberal stalwart who plans to retire in June at the end of the court’s current term.

"The president has not made a decision about who he is going to nominate," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday. "I’m not -- still not -- going to get into details about the internal process," Psaki said.

The selection of a Supreme Court justice involves extensive background checks to prevent unwelcome surprises during Senate nomination hearings. There have been two African-American Supreme Court justices: Thurgood Marshall, who served from 1967 to 1991, and Clarence Thomas, a conservative who succeeded Marshall and remains on the bench.

The following are reported to be at the top of the list for the seat on the nation’s highest court: Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a judge on the US Circuit Court of Appeals, does not have a background typical of other nominees.

While many judges have made their mark as prosecutors, Jackson spent two years as a federal public defender representing indigent defendants. She has also served on the US Sentencing Commission, an independent agency created by Congress to address sentencing disparities.

And Jackson has personal experience with the harsh sentences meted out for drug crimes in the United States -- an uncle was sentenced to life in prison in 1989 for cocaine possession. After graduation, she worked for a series of elite law firms in Boston and Washington, and as a law clerk for Breyer.

Jackson was nominated to be a US District Court judge by former president Barack Obama in 2013 and to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by Biden in March 2021. Her most notable ruling came in 2019 when she said a former White House counsel to president Donald Trump had to obey a congressional subpoena.