US President Joe Biden is set to fulfill a campaign promise by nominating who would become the first Black woman in the Supreme Court. Following a discussion with two Senate Judiciary Committee members, Biden hopes to get his nominee confirmed in a 40-day timeline.
Biden met with Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin and its ranking minority member Chuck Grassley at the White House this week to talk about his potential Supreme Court nominees. The US leader said that once he announces his nominee for the high court, he hopes that they would be confirmed by the Senate in a 40-day timeline, similar to the previous nominees. Biden is set to announce his nominee – who will succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer – at the end of the month.
“The Constitution says ‘advice and consent, advice and consent,’ and I’m serious when I say that I want the advice of the Senate as well as the consent to arrive on who the nominee should be,” Biden told reporters.
If the 40-day timeline is adhered to, the final Senate vote would be around the spring.
Grassley told reporters that he made it clear to Biden that he wants someone to “interpret the law, not make law” during the meeting.
To note, the previous Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, took 27 days to be confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate in 2020.
“The president’s view is that after 230 years of the Supreme Court being in existence, the fact that not a single Black woman has served on the Supreme Court is a failure in the process, not a failure or a lack of qualified Black women to serve as Supreme Court Justices,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki during a briefing Tuesday.
In other related news, Biden has relaunched the cancer “Moonshot” initiative during a White House ceremony this week, with the goal of cutting deaths by cancer in the US by half. The effort was launched in 2016 with $1.8 billion in federal funds spaced out over seven years. As of this year and 2023, only $400 million in funds remain for the initiative.