Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cautioned President Joe Biden not to nominate an "extreme left" nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Breyer's retirement was announced on Wednesday; Biden and Breyer held a joint news conference on Thursday to make it official. Biden said he will reveal his candidate before the end of February and that he would appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court.

McConell claims he'll have a "fair look" at Biden's Supreme Court nominee

Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and John Cornyn of Texas, both Republicans, reiterated McConnell's advice to pick a nominee who is more moderate in his jurisprudence. By voting 50-50, Democrats could hypothetically approve a Biden candidate without the assistance of the Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.

On a Supreme Court confirmation vote, there has never been a tie. The majority of recent Supreme Court appointments have been political, with just a few senators switching parties.

Despite blocking movement on now-Attorney General Merrick Garland's nomination to the court in 2016, McConnell oversaw the swift confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguing that confirmation should not occur in an election year with a Senate controlled by the president's party, as per Washington Examiner.

Biden has committed to appointing the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, as part of his long-standing commitment to diversify the federal court, which has historically been dominated by white males. So far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the first woman of color and the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court. In his first year in office, the president has already appointed the most federal judges in four decades, with a broad variety of ethnic, gender, and professional backgrounds.

In four months, Biden nominated twice as many minority women to the federal court as Trump had confirmed in four years. He currently has twice as many minority women on the federal bench as Trump.

The Senate has confirmed 42 of Biden's nominations as of January 26. There are 33 women among them and 29 people who identify as Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, or mixed. The spotlight on the Black female jurists who may succeed him has been renewed by Breyer's retirement.

Only two White men have been appointed as Article III judges, a category that includes Supreme Court justices as well as federal circuit and district judges. According to the US Constitution, these judges must be chosen by the president and approved by the Senate, Justices on the Supreme Court, and judges on the federal circuits and district courts.

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Biden vows to nominate a Black woman

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed to the prestigious US Court of Appeals for the DC last year, is on the list of prospective Supreme Court nominees. The Federal Judicial Center provides information on federal judges. This research took into account Federal Judges under Article III.

For each president's total, each judge has only been tallied once. Judges' racial and ethnic identifiers were submitted to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy by the judges themselves. Judges who identified as Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, or mixed were classified as minority judges in this study, according to The Washinton Post.

During his first year in office, Biden worked hard to propose a diverse set of federal judges, not only in terms of race but also in terms of professional experience; he has been looking into potential high court prospects along the way. He has appointed five Black women to the federal appeals courts, which are home to many of the nation's top judges, and the Senate is considering three more candidates.

He has overseen six Supreme Court confirmation hearings while serving as a senator, and he has extensive experience with the nomination process as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff and former top counsel to the Judiciary Committee and a former Supreme Court law clerk, will play a key role in the process.

At least one of the top nominees, 51-year-old Ketanji Brown Jackson, has already met with the president in person. She has been a federal trial court judge in the District of Columbia since 2013 and is a former Breyer clerk who worked at the US Sentencing Commission. Biden met her when she was being interviewed for her present position as an appeals court judge in the District of Columbia, HuffPost reported.

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