WASHINGTON — Now that President Joe Biden has chosen to nominate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court, his White House is trying to keep the landmark nomination from being overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis.
The White House has been laying the groundwork for weeks on a rollout strategy that relies heavily on outside groups and political allies to rally key constituency groups behind the nominee and promote her qualifications, while also pushing for the confirmation process itself to move quickly and smoothly on Capitol Hill.
The high court announcement, followed in quick succession by Biden's first State of the Union address, had been viewed by top White House officials as crucial to their hope of rebuilding political momentum for Biden and his party as they head into the midterm campaign. Now officials are adapting the playbook they used to announce his vice presidential selection to try to keep the historic moment from becoming an afterthought to the escalating conflict in Ukraine.
The rollout comes with a historical echo. It was two years ago Friday that Biden helped revive his presidential campaign with the pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the high court, when a vacancy occurred.
Even as the Ukraine crisis has crowded Biden’s schedule in recent weeks, he continued to hold regular meetings with his Supreme Court team — sometimes multiple times a day. Led by White House counsel Dana Remus and nomination advisers Doug Jones and Minyon Moore, that team typically held multiple daily meetings with White House staff to review the status of his search and strategize about the announcement and confirmation battle to come. Vice President Kamala Harris has also met regularly with the team and helped take the temperature of her former colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, officials say.
The White House has kept a tight lid on the process. Only this week did officials confirm the president had begun in-person interviews with potential nominees, while saying he was on track to meet his end-of-month deadline.
The White House has been touting that Biden is poised to make his selection faster than any Democratic president in decades. But in another way, he’s been preparing for far longer, receiving a briefing from top legal advisers about potential Supreme Court picks during the transition more than a year ago.
Jackson had always been seen as the front-runner. She was already familiar to Biden from six years ago, when he was vice president and she interviewed with President Barack Obama as part of the search for a nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Biden also moved quickly to elevate Jackson to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last March, the first of eight black women he nominated for appellate judgeships.
“The Supreme Court strategy was not independent of the broader judicial strategy,” said a top Biden campaign advisor who has spoken with the White House about the Supreme Court search. “It was just a question of when, not if.”
The fact that the Ukraine crisis increasingly ate away at Biden’s already tight schedule may in fact have served to keep the process focused and leak-free, say officials.
“When you don’t have time to think, you don’t have time to overthink,” a Biden aide joked.
Biden’s selection team, in addition to providing him with briefing materials on potential candidates and consulting with the senators who will soon vote on the final choice, have held regular briefings with outside groups who they are counting on to build support for Jackson’s confirmation. It builds on the strategy Biden’s campaign employed around his vice presidential announcement, to encourage grassroots efforts to support the nominee and respond quickly to any attacks.
“We also want to make sure that we have an army of empowered advocates ready to ensure not only that our nominee is able to successfully navigate this process, but also come through confirmed but with her integrity intact,” said Kim Tignor, who co-founded She Will Rise to promote Black women for the federal judiciary.
She Will Rise has been working in advance of the selection, including a campaign around the NBA All-Star Game last week in which some players wore shirts saying, “Black Women Belong On The Court.” Whenever a pick was to be announced, She Will Rise planned to release a signatories to a petition urging her swift confirmation and launch a campaign to highlight the lives of Black women leaders around the country whose work would be affected by the Supreme Court.
Tignor has been part of meetings with the White House meant to keep groups like hers up to date on the process. “Those meetings have been happening pretty regularly, and as you can imagine, are increasing as we get closer and closer,” she said.
Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist with close ties to the White House, worked with a collective of Black women to, among other things, conduct media training with Black women — local elected leaders, deans of law schools and community leaders — who could help make the case for the nominee quickly after she was announced.
The goal is to tell Jackson’s story, promote her qualifications and show support for her confirmation.
“Black women are excited and want to be helpful, so we’re trying to help create an infrastructure they can plug into,” Finney said ahead of the nomination news. “We’re going to mobilize.”
