Biden’s March 2020 Campaign Promise on SCOTUS Nominees: ‘I’ll Appoint the First Black Woman to the Court’
As news broke Wednesday that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this term, speculation as to who President Joe Biden might nominate to replace him began immediately – bringing pundits to recall a key Biden 2020 campaign pledge.
“I’ll appoint the first Black woman to the Court. It’s required that they have representation now — it’s long overdue,” Biden said during a March 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Washington, DC.
Biden added, “Secondly if I am elected president my cabinet, my administration would look like the country. And I commit that I’ll pick a woman to be vice president” – a pledge he made good on with Kamala Harris.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden’s remaining competitor at the time, made a similar commitment during the debate, but with one notable difference.
“For me it’s not just nominating a woman,” Sanders noted. “It’s making sure we have progressive women … and there are progressive women out there, so my very strong tendency is to move in that direction.”
Two leading contenders for Breyer’s seat, according to NPR, are “said to be federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was on President Barack Obama’s shortlist for the court in 2016, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, who served as assistant, and then deputy solicitor general in both Democratic and Republican administrations prior to her nomination to California’s highest court.”
CNN noted at the time of Biden’s pledge:
No African-American woman has ever been nominated. Among the 114 justices who have served since 1789, there have been two African-American men (Clarence Thomas and the late Thurgood Marshall) and one Latina (Sonia Sotomayor).
