Stephen Breyer gave the chance to a liberal successor – when will he use it?

Stephen Breyer gave the chance to a liberal successor – when will he use it?

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Breyer, who before becoming a judge was a senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows better than most how the surprise election in Georgia last week changed the prospects for Biden to pursue a progressive judicial agenda.

The Supreme Court is controlled by a 6-3 Conservative-Liberal majority. Replacing Breyer, currently the oldest judge, with another liberal would therefore not change the 6-3 dynamic or reduce the power of the three judges that President Donald Trump installed on the right wing.

A choice of Biden will continue to improve the diversity and youth of the bank and open a new chapter for judges who have the final say on issues of abortion and LGBTQ rights, religious freedoms and racial remedies, to federal power and corporate regulation.

Elected President Biden has vowed to nominate the first black woman on the bench. When he initially made the promise during a debate in February 2020 in Charleston, he said: “I look forward to making sure there is a black woman in the Supreme Court, to ensuring we get every representation.”

Among such candidates could be U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 50, in Washington, DC, a former Justice Breyer clerk. Another possibility would be Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, 44, in California. Other black women with different backgrounds will no doubt be in the mix if a vacancy arises.

Breyer, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1994, declined to comment on questions about any retirement plans.

Breyer is known for many foreign activities, including an enthusiasm for architecture, and he has written several books related to legislation and regulation. Such outside interests, coupled with the new democratic dynamics in the country’s capital, could prompt him to leave the bank, perhaps even this summer when the current 2020-21 session ends.

His new book, to be published by this year, “Against Segregation in America’s Schools,” may be his offense. It examines the completion of school integration today and is linked to one of Breyer’s leading opinions for judges on the left.

In 2007, he wrote a dissenting opinion to Chief Justice John Roberts’ view that school districts could not consider a student’s race when doing school assignments as a way of integrating districts. “This is a decision the court and the nation will regret,” Breyer wrote, adding that the court’s action in the Seattle case “would break the (promise)” of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected. the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Breyer is focused on the politics of judicial affirmations and the difficult calculations involved in retirement decisions. In the 1970s, he was a mainstay of Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary.

A departure from Breyer this year will lead to the first successful Democratic nominee since 2010, when Senate President Barack Obama’s nominee Elena Kagan confirmed.

Judges sit for life and long after a president leaves office, his legacy and priorities in the law live on.

Trump’s three judges represented a major achievement, especially for a one-term president. But Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch in 2017 was only possible because the Republican Senate refused to consider Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to replace late Judge Antonin Scalia.

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As it happens, Garland, the chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circus since 1997, has another chance for a Senate vote. Elected President Biden has named Garland as his nominee to head the Department of Justice as Attorney General.

The Scalia / Garland battle in the Senate was the first in a series of controversial succession battles on the nine-bank bench that culminated in Trump’s appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett in October to succeed Liberal Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In addition to Barrett and Gorsuch, Trump appointed Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The other Republican appointments are Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The third Democratic nominee, with Breyer and Kagan, is Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Ginsburg, Breyer’s co-nominated Clinton, rejected the pressure to retire while Obama was in office.

“Then tell me who the president could nominate this spring that you would rather see in court than I do?” she said in an interview in 2014, evoking the complicated politics that were already underway in Obama’s second term. She died on September 18, four months before the end of the Trump term.

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Biden will fill separate appointments in the lower court separately over the next four years, including the vacancy that would occur through Garland’s departure from the DC Circuit. That bank is often called the country’s “second highest court” because of its important governmental power.

An biden appointment will not change the ideological or political character of the bank, but it will improve its diversity. Thomas is currently the only black member of the court; Justice Sotomayor was the first Latina judge named.

The average age of the current judges is 63; the three youngest and those who could have the most influence on the law in the coming decades are Gorsuch (53), Kavanaugh (55) and Barrett (48).

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Biden was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Breyer was a chief executive. Biden later became chairman of the committee and in 1994 oversaw Breyer’s confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court.

Biden referred to the service when he opened the session almost 27 years ago, and Breyer responded in kind: ‘While working here on this committee in the 1970s, I learned a lot about Congress, government and politics. life.’

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