Harris will have key role in selecting nominee
WASHINGTON
Vice President Kamala Harris has a new assignment: helping President Joe Biden select the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Biden said Thursday that he would nominate a Black woman to replace retiring liberal Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and that he would consult leading scholars and lawyers on the appointment.
“And I’m fortunate to have advising me in the selection process Vice President Kamala Harris,” Biden said. “She’s an exceptional lawyer, former attorney general of the state of California and former member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Harris brings a wide breadth of experience to the job of picking a Supreme Court justice. She was known as a liberal San Francisco prosecutor and a center-left California attorney general.
As attorney general, Harris sat on the state’s Judicial Appointments Commission, which reviews the governor’s judicial selections, when Judge Leondra Kruger was appointed to California’s high court. Kruger is among the women that Biden is said to be considering for the federal Supreme Court vacancy.
As a U.S. senator from 2017 to 2019, Harris established herself as a tough questioner of former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees as a Senate Judiciary Committee member.
“It’s hard to imagine that there’s a better person who could help prepare a nominee for the types of questions they could receive during the confirmation process,” said Nathan Barankin, a top aide to Harris when she was attorney general who later served as her Senate chief of staff.
Avis Jones-DeWeever, an author and founder of the Exceptional Black Woman Network, told McClatchy Harris was the best adviser Biden could have in this search.
“She would provide not only a keen insight on Black women at the top in the judicial arena, but as a person who has, herself, personal experience of what it’s like to break glass ceilings and thrive, she would also provide critical perspectives on who could handle the intense spotlight of this moment, and still come out on top,” Jones-DeWeever said.
Vice presidential scholar and emeritus Saint Louis University law professor Joel Goldstein said Harris’ familiarity with current committee members and their aides makes her among the most important players in the appointment process.
“To the extent that she knows a candidate or has opinions about who’s the right choice, that’s going to be something that she’s going to have a chance to put on the table and to persuade him,” Goldstein said.
In his remarks Thursday on Breyer’s retirement and the justice selection process, Biden said he would meet with the potential nominees and intends to announce his decision before the end of February.