(NewsNation Now) — President Joe Biden is expected to make a formal announcement on Thursday as Justice Stephen Breyer prepares to retire from the Supreme Court at the end of the term.
Breyer's impending retirement comes after more than two decades as a Supreme Court Justice. At 83, Breyer is the oldest member of the court and the most senior member of its three-member liberal wing.
NewsNation will live stream the announcement in the video player at the top of this page.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden remains committed to appointing a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
Psaki didn’t say who might be considered to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, but two names have seemingly topped any list of potential nominees:
Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, attended Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school. President Barack Obama nominated her to be a district court judge, and Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Early in her career, she was also a law clerk for Breyer.
Leondra Kruger, 45, is a justice on the California Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard and Yale’s law school, she served as a law clerk on the high court before arguing a dozen cases before the court as a lawyer for the federal government. But Kruger, whose mother is Jamaican, has also been described as a moderate, which could be a tough sell for some liberal Democratic senators.
Biden could also choose someone from outside the judiciary, though that seems less likely.
Selecting a Black woman for the lifetime post on the nation’s highest court would be historic. It would mark the first time four women would sit together on the court and the first time two of the court’s nine justices would be Black. Justice Clarence Thomas is the court’s only Black justice and only the second in history after the man he replaced on the court, Thurgood Marshall.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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