The first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court by President Biden will happen in a matter of weeks. He has been shaping the federal bench as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for decades.
Jeremy Paris, a policy counsel at the Raben Group who worked with Biden on the committee from 2005 until he left the Senate to serve as Barack Obama's vice president in 2009, says it will be a finale.
Biden will almost certainly benefit politically from successfully installing his pick on the Supreme Court after months of setbacks and dispiriting poll numbers.
There has never been someone in the White House with a deeper understanding of the Supreme Court selection process than President Biden. Absolutely.
Biden will have a chance to atone for his treatment of Hill during the Clarence Thomas fight if he picks a Black woman. Biden oversaw Thomas's confirmation when he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Hill, an attorney who worked for Thomas at two government agencies in the 1980s, said she was sexually harassed by Thomas on numerous occasions; Thomas denied the allegations, and likened the confirmation hearings in which Hill testified to a high-tech lynching.
Biden voted against Thomas's confirmation, but later apologized to Hill.
I wish I had been able to do more for her. Jimmy Kimmel made a joke this week that Biden should nominate Hill.
During his time as Judiciary Committee chairman, he oversaw six Supreme Court confirmations, four of which were from Republican presidents.
The last of those nominations was that of Breyer, who was a relatively uncontroversial Boston circuit judge. The two men have known each other since the late 1970s, when Breyer was working as a special counsel for the Judiciary Committee, Biden said on Thursday as he formally announced Breyer's retirement, which will come at the end of the Supreme Court session.
"He's been in the trenches for decades, and I worked with him on several of those nominations," said Aron, who founded the Alliance for Justice. In the last two decades, the number of progressive groups focused on judicial activism has increased greatly, with some using the confirmation fight of the Supreme Court nominee as a kind of Washington launching pad.
Aron says that he will have a formidable army, though it is not yet clear if he will need one, given that Democrats have a majority in the Senate. It's not much of a problem for Republicans to stop Biden's pick because every Senate Democrat stays in line.
The first nominee Biden encountered as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was the U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bork. Bork was a key ally of Nixon during the Watergate scandal and was portrayed as a far-right judge by liberals.
America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at lunch counter segregation and children could not be taught about it.
In his first year as the committee's chairman, Bork's immense intelligence could have posed a problem for Biden. Biden prepared well for the hearings, which won praise from the liberals.
He studied Bork's record and wrote a lot before the hearings. Biden oversaw the failure of his first presidential campaign, but he helped sink Bork's nomination in a series of hearings.
Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times wrote that he earned praise from all sides for the fairness and good humor with which he ran the proceedings.
Bork's failed nomination gave rise to the concept of "Borking", which refers to the allegedly unfair treatment of a judicial candidate. Since then, most judicial nominees have been more circumspect than the imperious Bork, a testament to how capably Biden managed to tease out his most radical ideas about jurisprudence.
Paris, the former Judiciary Committee aide, said that Biden will be very aware of what the nominee might face at the hearing. The hearings will be a chance for an outstanding legal mind to present herself to the nation and make Biden look good at the same time.
The hearings have been televised since 1981 and Americans are paying attention. It is the only democratic moment in the process.
Biden's nominee could be the third black justice on the Supreme Court. President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall. Clarence Thomas was confirmed despite Biden's efforts.
Thomas was nominated in 1991 by President Bush and was seen by conservatives as an example of how far the United States had come since the days of legal segregation. Democrats were worried that he would prove to be an opponent of affirmative action and legal abortion.
Hill had accused Thomas of harassment when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the book about the Thomas hearings, journalists Jane andJill describe Biden as accommodating towards the Republicans.
They write that the result was a rushed investigation into her accusations against Thomas, followed by hearings in which those accusations were greeted with skepticism from Republicans.
An aide to Ted Kennedy said that Biden agreed to the terms of the people who were out to disembowel Hill.
Biden voted against Thomas in both the committee and the full Senate, but his skepticism of Hill's claims continued to hound him into the 2020 presidential campaign, 20 years after those hearings took place.
Paris says that he learns from these experiences. Biden told an interviewer that he took responsibility for the Thomas nomination not being treated well.
Biden moved to the federal bench after becoming president. He nominated eight black women to the bench, which is usually used to pick Supreme Court nominees. The White House chief of staff is Ron Klain, who was an attorney for the Judiciary Committee and oversaw judicial appointments for President Clinton. The West Wing is where many of Biden's earlier posts in politics are located.
"This is not going to be an amateur hour, these guys know what they're doing."
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