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 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.
Harris as California attorney general sat on the state’s Commission on Judicial Appointments, 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 2021, 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.
Biden and the Supreme Court
Biden is a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and was heavily involved as vice president in the appointment of Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
A third seat also became vacant in 2016 while Biden was vice president. President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, who did not get a vote in the Republican-run Senate and never served on the court.
When he was committee chairman from 1987 to 1995, Biden presided over hearings for six Supreme Court Justice nominees, four appointed by Republicans and two by Democrats. All but one, Robert Bork, was confirmed. Biden helped lead the opposition to Bork, appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
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.
“That’s not to say that he’s ultimately going to agree with her,” he added.
Harris was not present when Biden spoke from the Roosevelt Room with Breyer at his side, and her office did not provide a comment for this article. Harris was in Honduras for the day attending the inauguration of the Central American country’s new president.
Harris has not personally litigated before the Supreme Court, but she filed a number of briefs with the court as attorney general, Barankin said.
She does extensive research for Supreme Court and judicial hearings, the former Harris chief of staff said, examining past cases to determine judges’ judicial philosophy and prepare questions that are intended to make it as difficult as possible for nominees not to answer her queries.
“She goes deep,” Barankin said.
Harris and nominees
Harris received widespread notice during the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
She pressed Kavanaugh on abortion rights, asking the judge, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Kavanaugh looked perplexed and said he was “not thinking of any right now.”
There were other exchanges, too, and Harris was lauded by liberals for her performance. Kavanaugh was confirmed largely along party lines, 50-48, with Harris providing one of the Democratic votes against him.
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.
In a split Senate where Republicans and Democrats each have 50 seats, it could fall to Harris to cast the deciding vote on the eventual nominee. The vice president also acts as president of the Senate, and Harris has cast tie-breaking votes on other Biden nominations.
Whether Harris will be a strong advocate for the current California-based favorite Kruger for the vacancy is unclear. Kruger has a reputation – just as the one Harris had during her days as attorney general – as more pragmatic than ideological.
Harris was San Francisco’s top prosecutor from 2004 to 2011. She was elected California’s attorney general in 2010 and 2014 and easily won a U.S. Senate seat in 2016.
She came under some fire as attorney general from many leaders of communities of color; at one point she called herself the state’s “top cop.” She didn’t support a 2015 bid to require all law enforcement officials to wear body cameras, or a 2004 state initiative to loosen California’s minimum mandatory sentencing laws.
Once in the Senate, though, she became a leading voice in police reform efforts, and today, Black community activists laud Harris’ work and the prospect of the nation’s first Black and female vice president helping choose a court nominee.
As for her record as a prosecutor, Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina based Democratic strategist, said that is not as important as the fights she’s taken on in recent years.
“People evolve and people learn. Where she is is a different place,” Seawright said.
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