Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, but at this point I’d put the odds at 95% or higher that President Biden will nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed Justice Breyer. It wouldn’t surprise me if an announcement is made well before Biden’s target deadline of the end of February.
As I’ve made clear (especially on Twitter), California supreme court justice Leondra Kruger strikes me as markedly the best of the candidates in legal acumen and the one most likely to have greatest liberal influence on the legal culture. Kruger worked with Elena Kagan and Neal Katyal in the Office of the Solicitor General in the Obama administration, including as Katyal’s principal deputy when he was acting solicitor general. Katyal calls her “if not the most extraordinary lawyer I have worked with, pretty darn close.” Even if you apply a puffery discount, that’s still much higher praise than anyone in high legal standing could credibly offer for any of the other candidates. And it comports well with what I hear from others who have worked with Kruger in different capacities.
Why, then, do I believe that Kruger has little chance of getting picked?
One big problem for her is that having earned a reputation as a centrist on a very liberal California supreme court, she is now being depicted as a moderate. Even if that label applies more accurately to her style than to her substance, it hurts her with the Left. And it certainly doesn’t help her that one of her colleagues who is even further to her left on that court is Goodwin Liu, a favorite of progressives.
Another big problem for her, in terms of the narrative the Left favors, is that she was born to a life of apparent privilege. The daughter of two pediatricians, “her father white and Jewish, her mother Black and Jamaican-born,” she “grew up in South Pasadena, a leafy Los Angeles suburb so old-fashioned that the movie ‘Back to the Future’ was filmed there,” and she “attended the elite Polytechnic School nearby,” before going to Harvard College and Yale Law School. (Quotes are from this New York Times article, which is ostensibly very favorable to Kruger but which will probably hurt her much more than it helps.)
A third problem is that she turned down the Biden administration’s invitation to be Solicitor General, and her ties to the White House are therefore not as strong as they might be.