Vacancy to Give Biden His First Chance to Nominate a Justice

The first change came in 2013, when Democrats, stymied by Republican filibusters against President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, unilaterally changed the rules to allow most executive branch nominations to skirt an attempted filibuster with a simple majority of 51 votes. Supreme Court nominees were not included.

After Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Republicans moved quickly to expand the filibuster exemption to cover nominees to the Supreme Court, clearing the way for Mr. Trump to fill three vacancies and leaving Democrats with no recourse to stop him.

The filibuster change that Senators debated last week was for legislation, which is considered on a separate track from nominations. Two Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, joined all 50 Republicans in opposing that revision, halting President Biden’s voting rights bill, which lacks enough votes to overcome a G.O.P. blockade.

When Republicans blocked Mr. Obama’s nomination of Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, they did not need to use the filibuster, since they had a majority in the Senate and simply refused to take up Mr. Garland’s appointment.

Though Democrats do not need to worry about Republicans using a filibuster against the forthcoming nominee, winning confirmation is no slam dunk. With the Senate split 50-50, Vice President Kamala Harris will be needed to break a tie vote, meaning Democrats will have to either hold all 50 of their members together or win backing from Republicans. In addition, the illness or even death of a single Democratic senator could deprive them of their majority and greatly complicate confirmation proceedings.

If Republicans take back control of the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, it is conceivable that they would block any nominations by Mr. Biden to the high court and try to await the outcome of the 2024 elections.

Here is a rundown of the age and tenure of the remaining members of the court:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who turns 67 on Thursday, was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005 to replace Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. In his 16 years on the bench, the court has shifted from four reliably conservative votes to six, delivering the chief justice considerable power on a range of issues. In some cases, he has taken a moderate stance, joining with the court’s liberal bloc, and has often been forced into a public role defending the court’s independence.

Justice Clarence Thomas, nominated in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush, has been one of the court’s most steadfastly conservative members over the past three decades and set himself apart for his eagerness to revisit longstanding legal precedents. At 73, he will become both the court’s oldest and most senior member with Justice Breyer’s departure.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., 71, was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2006. By some measures, he is considered even more conservative than Justice Thomas. Especially in recent years, Justice Alito has grown more public about his conservative stance, telling an audience at the Federalist Society’s annual convention in 2020 that liberals posed a growing threat to religious liberty and freedom of speech.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009, becoming the first woman of color on the Supreme Court. At 67, she would become the oldest member of the court’s liberal wing.

Justice Elena Kagan, 61, was President Obama’s second nominee to the court in 2010 after serving as his solicitor general, becoming one of only a few justices who had never served as a judge. Along with Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan has delivered the most reliably liberal votes among current members.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, 54, the first of President Donald J. Trump’s three nominees, was confirmed in 2017. Despite a strong conservative stance on most questions, Justice Gorsuch has swung left on select occasions, such as siding with gay and transgender workers in a 2020 case testing the reach of the Civil Rights Act.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, 56, was nominated by President Trump in 2018. Though widely noted for his conservative philosophy, Justice Kavanaugh last year surprised some observers by replacing Chief Justice Roberts at the court’s ideological center, voting with the majority in split decisions in 87 percent of cases.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by President Trump in 2020 after a contentious fight to fill the seat previously held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal. As an appeals court judge, Justice Barrett earned a reputation as profoundly conservative on issues including abortion and gun rights. She will turn 50 on Friday, making her both the youngest and the newest member of the court — at least for now.

On the importance of the court: “I think it is terribly important to have an institution where I see every kind of American, every race, every religion, every possible point of view. And they have decided to come into a courtroom to resolve their differences rather than through violence on the street.”

On lifetime appointments for Supreme Court Justices: “I actually think if you were doing it afresh, you wouldn’t need to have a lifetime appointment. The Constitution doesn’t actually say lifetime. It says they will have their office during good behavior, and that has been interpreted as lifetime. And as a very practical matter, I think you should have a long term, and the reason that you should have a long term is because you don‘t want the judge sitting there thinking what is his next job going to be. That is just a thoroughly bad idea.”

On politicizing the Court, from “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics” (2021): If the public comes to see judges as merely ‘politicians in robes,’ its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only decline,” With that, the Court’s authority can only decline, too, including its hard-won power to act as a constitutional check on the other branches.

On reading widely: “Law requires both a head and a heart. You need a good head to read all those words and figure out how they apply. But when you are representing human beings or deciding things that affect them, you need to understand, as best you can, the workings of human life.”

On the future: “One hundred years from now we will have recently inaugurated a president of the United States, following a free election the preceding November. I share that prediction and hope. It sounds unremarkable; yet that very fact — that it is unremarkable — suggests something unique about our society.”

And she is well known at the court, having served as an acting deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration, presenting 12 arguments on behalf of the federal government.

She is anomalous in at least one way, in that she serves on a state court. Eight of the current justices served on federal appeals courts before being named to the Supreme Court. The ninth, Justice Elena Kagan, had no prior judicial service, though she had been dean of Harvard Law School and solicitor general.

The last justice elevated directly from a state court was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981.

Justice Kruger is 45, which is on the younger side for a Supreme Court nominee. With one exception — Justice Clarence Thomas, who was 43 — all of the current justices were older when they were nominated.

Justice Kruger grew up in the Los Angeles area, the daughter of two doctors. She went to high school in Pasadena before attending Harvard. After law school, where she was the first Black woman to serve as editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal, she worked at prominent law firms and in the Justice Department.

As acting deputy solicitor general, she argued for a narrow interpretation of the “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, saying that the court’s analysis should be essentially the same whether the employer accused of discrimination was a private business or a church.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected her position. “We cannot accept the remarkable view that the religion clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.

In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, named Justice Kruger to the State Supreme Court. Legal analysts have called her cautious and deliberate, a characterization she has embraced.

“My approach reflects the fact that we operate in a system of precedent,” Justice Kruger told The Los Angeles Times in 2018. “I aim to perform my job in a way that enhances the predictability and stability of the law and public confidence and trust in the work of the courts.”

Mr. Schumer wants the entire process to take weeks, not months, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity.

Presidents have historically taken anywhere from days to months to make a nomination to the Supreme Court after a vacancy occurs. Justice Breyer is preparing to retire at the end of the Supreme Court term in June, but Democrats plan to begin the process of confirming a nominee to succeed him as soon as Mr. Biden announces a candidate. The new justice could then be seated shortly after Justice Breyer officially steps down, the person familiar with Mr. Schumer’s thinking said.

The party that controls the Senate can move as quickly or as slowly as its leaders want in vetting and confirming a Supreme Court nominee. In 1941, for example, the Senate confirmed a Supreme Court justice the same day he was nominated. In the 1840s, it took two presidents five different attempts over more than two years to gain approval for a replacement for former Justice Henry Baldwin.

In the modern era, when Republicans controlled the chamber, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky showed how much power the majority party has in moving nominees quickly — or not at all. He refused even to hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s final nominee to the court for nearly a year, effectively killing the nomination of Merrick Garland, now the attorney general.

By contrast, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon, died just six weeks before the 2020 election, Mr. McConnell pushed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, then a conservative appeals court judge, over unified Democratic opposition in just over five weeks.

Mr. Schumer wants to replicate that timetable, the person said. In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Durbin pledged to move the nominee “expeditiously through the committee.”

Because of changes to Senate rules in 2013 and 2017, Supreme Court nominations are no longer subject to filibusters, so Democrats would not need any Republican support to confirm Mr. Biden’s nominee if they could hold their ranks together in support.

But Republicans can take some steps to try to slow down the process, as Democrats did with Justice Barrett’s nomination, including demanding that all members be physically present in the chamber to conduct business; forcing roll-call votes; and boycotting the Judiciary Committee vote to force the majority party to break Senate rules to advance the nominee. Republicans could also try to grind the process to a halt by denying Democrats a quorum in committee.

Those delay tactics could slow down the confirmation by a matter of hours or even days, and the even split of the Judiciary Committee means Democrats might have to include Republicans more in the process to keep the delays to a minimum.

If the nominee cannot gain any Republican support in committee, it could prompt Mr. Schumer to try to draft the nominee out of the committee and onto the floor.

The Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris empowered to cast tiebreaking votes for the Democrats. If all Republicans are opposed to Mr. Biden’s nominee and all Democrats and independents hold together to support her, it would be the first time an evenly divided Senate had confirmed a Supreme Court justice.

Once Mr. Biden makes the nomination, Mr. Durbin and the top Republican on the committee, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, will negotiate a questionnaire to send to the nominee and Mr. Durbin will schedule a public meeting of the Judiciary Committee to vet the nominee with lawyers from both parties gathering information about the candidate’s background. The panel will hear from witnesses in a process that can last several days. At the end, if the committee approves the nominee, he or she will advance to the full Senate for confirmation.

Democrats have this ability only as long as their keep their majority in the chamber. Losing even one net seat in November’s elections could hand Republicans control of the chamber, and make approving a Biden nominee impossible.

Just three Republicans — Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted in June to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is considered a front-runner to succeed Justice Stephen G. Breyer, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“I think she’s qualified for the job,” Mr. Graham, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters at the time. “She has a different philosophy than I do.”

But backing someone for an appeals court post does not guarantee the same level of support for a high court vacancy. Multiple senators have voted against Supreme Court nominees they had previously backed.

Ms. Murkowski, a centrist Republican who is seeking re-election this year, has previously gone her own way on high court nominations, opposing President Donald J. Trump’s choice of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018 but backing his nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. Ms. Collins, another closely watched senator on Supreme Court nominations, voted to confirm Mr. Kavanaugh but opposed Ms. Barrett.

Support for high court nominees from the opposite party of the president has been in steady decline as the partisanship of Supreme Court fights has increased, along with consideration of nominees for federal judgeships at every level. Even district court nominees, who in the past were often approved on voice votes, now draw heavy opposition. And Republicans have promised to dig in even deeper this year, after the White House rejected some Republican recommendations for home-state court openings.

As Republicans have lined up against Mr. Biden’s judicial nominees, party leaders argue it is only fair to do so given the depth of opposition Democrats showed to Mr. Trump’s judicial choices.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which will consider Mr. Biden’s nominee to succeed Mr. Breyer, also includes multiple Republican senators considered possible future presidential candidates. Those senators, in particular, will want to try to demonstrate to Republican voters their views on who should — and should not be — on the high court.

One factor to be considered, though, is Mr. Biden’s pledge to seat the first Black woman on the high court. That historic development could conceivably influence the votes of Republicans who want to be counted as supporters of diversifying the court.

Mr. Clyburn, who helped Mr. Biden revive his candidacy with a crucial primary win in South Carolina nearly two years ago, made a case that Judge Childs would not only satisfy Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to appoint a Black woman to the court, but that the judge was particularly appealing because she came from a blue-collar background — another underrepresented group among federal judges.

“One of the things we have to be very, very careful of as Democrats is being painted with that elitist brush,” Mr. Clyburn told The New York Times last year for an article that revealed how he was pushing her for the court.

He added: “When people talk to diversity they are always looking at race and ethnicity — I look beyond that to diversity of experience.”

As Mr. Biden weighs whom to appoint to fill the seat of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Childs is seen as a potential contender — albeit an outside one — alongside two other possibilities: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court.

Judge Jackson and Justice Kruger attended Ivy League law schools, unlike Judge Childs, who attended the University of South Carolina.

The president has already moved to give Judge Childs a promotion: He said in December that he would nominate her to the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia Circuit, a frequent staging ground for potential Supreme Court justices. The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing for her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit for next Tuesday, a process that could draw more attention to her and provide an opportunity for her to impress the White House.

Mr. Clyburn, whose endorsement of Mr. Biden at a low point in his run for the Democratic Party’s nomination helped him win South Carolina and propel him to the presidency, is expected to push the White House in the coming days to nominate Judge Childs.

“Not just for our party, but for the judiciary, it’s important to have somebody who has lived experiences,” Mr. Clyburn told The Times last year.

Judge Childs’s mother moved her to South Carolina from Michigan after her father died when she was a child. Her mother worked for telephone companies. Judge Childs attended the University of South Florida as an undergraduate on a scholarship. She then began the climb from the bottom of the legal world to the federal judiciary. In 1992, she became the first female law partner at a prominent firm in South Carolina. She later served as a state judge before President Barack Obama nominated her in 2010 to be a district court judge.

In one of her more high-profile cases, Judge Childs struck down a South Carolina rule during the 2020 election that would have required a witness to sign absentee ballots, a move intended to make it more onerous to vote, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.

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But there was little evidence of that in recent months. In cases on abortion, immigration and the Biden administration’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic, he repeatedly found himself in dissent.

His voting over the years was generally similar to that of other Democratic appointees, if perhaps a little more conservative, according to a new report from Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of the University of Michigan.

The report found that he cast the smallest percentage of liberal votes among the Democratic appointees with whom he served — Justices Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. His disagreements with the other liberals, the report found, “tended to fall disproportionately in the area of criminal procedure.”

In 2013, for instance, he voted with the majority to allow the police to take DNA samples from people arrested in connection with serious offenses. The other liberals dissented.

Though he made frequent public appearances in all sorts of settings, he was far less prominent than some of his more colorful colleagues. He routinely came in last in public opinion surveys in which respondents were asked to name the justices.

In a Marquette Law School poll released this month, only 21 percent of Americans said they were able to express an opinion about him, the lowest for any member of the court.

Still, when he was promoting a book he could seem ubiquitous. Last year, he gave countless interviews in connection with the publication of “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.”

The book explored the nature of the court’s legitimacy and said it was undermined by labeling justices as conservative or liberal. Drawing a distinction between law and politics, Justice Breyer wrote that not all splits on the court were predictable and that those that were could generally be explained by differences in judicial philosophy or interpretive methods.

In an interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that the politicians who had transformed confirmation hearings into partisan brawls held a different view, but he said the justices acted in good faith, often finding consensus and occasionally surprising the public in significant cases.

“Didn’t one of the most conservative — quote — members join with the others in the gay rights case?” he asked in the interview, referring to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s 2020 majority opinion in a ruling that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.

Justice Breyer was an idiosyncratic questioner on the Supreme Court bench. Lawyers appearing before the court sometimes resented his elaborate hypothetical questions, which could resemble an interior monologue with a point discernible only to him. They sometimes ended with a simple request: “Respond.”

At the same time, his questions were evidence of intense curiosity and an open mind, which often contrasted with the more strategic inquiries of his fellow justices.

In his judicial writing, Justice Breyer sometimes drew fine distinctions.

He was, for instance, the only justice in the majority both times in a pair of 2005 cases that allowed a six-foot-high Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol but held unconstitutional the posting of framed copies of the Commandments on the walls of Kentucky courthouses. A conservative bloc of justices would have upheld both kinds of displays, while a liberal bloc would have required their removal.

Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion in 2000 in Stenberg v. Carhart, a 5-to-4 decision that struck down a Nebraska law banning a procedure that its opponents called partial-birth abortion.

He was characteristically balanced in presenting the clash of values.

“Millions of Americans believe that life begins at conception and consequently that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child; they recoil at the thought of a law that would permit it,” he wrote. “Other millions fear that a law that forbids abortion would condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity, depriving them of equal liberty and leading those with least resources to undergo illegal abortions with the attendant risks of death and suffering.”

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented,” Mr. Biden said that night.

The promise helped Mr. Biden secure the support of Representative James Clyburn, a veteran Black Democrat from South Carolina, just days ahead of the party’s contest in that state. Last year, Mr. Clyburn confirmed a report in the book “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, that he had urged Mr. Biden to make the promise during the debate.

“I have three daughters,” Mr. Clyburn told Bloomberg. “I think I would be less than a good dad if I did not say to the president-to-be, this is an issue that is simmering in the African-American community that Black women think they have as much right to sit on the Supreme Court as any other women, and up to that point none had been considered.”

With Mr. Clyburn’s endorsement, Mr. Biden went on to win the South Carolina primary, proving the durability of his support among Black voters and setting in motion a string of victories on Super Tuesday a short time later.

In the weeks and months that followed, Mr. Biden repeated the promise. And after becoming president, Mr. Biden made it clear that he intended to make good on the promise if he got the opportunity.

Asked during a news briefing in March, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, confirmed that the president remained committed to the promise.

“Of course, to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court,” she said. “Yes, absolutely.​”

Mr. Biden has not said who he will nominate. But speculation has focused on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who graduated from Harvard Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Breyer, and Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court, who graduated from Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens.

In a meeting with Mr. Biden in the Oval Office, Mr. Clyburn has pushed for Judge J. Michelle Childs of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., a graduate of the University of South Carolina’s law school and a former law firm partner who also worked in state government.

She was confirmed to the appeals court in June by a 53-to-44 vote. All 50 members of the Democratic caucus voted for her, as did three Republican senators: Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Three Republicans did not vote.

Judge Jackson, who clerked for Justice Breyer during the Supreme Court’s 1999-2000 term, was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Miami. She graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

She worked several legal jobs early in her career, including as a staff member for the United States Sentencing Commission and, from 2005 to 2007, as an assistant federal public defender in Washington. In 2012, President Barack Obama nominated her to serve as a district court judge in the capital.

During her eight and a half years on the Federal District Court bench, Judge Jackson handled a number of challenges to executive agency actions that raised questions of administrative law. She also heard several cases that attracted particular political attention.

Among them, in 2019, she ruled that Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump, had to obey a congressional subpoena seeking his testimony over Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.

“Presidents are not kings,” she wrote, adding that current and former White House officials owe their allegiance to the Constitution. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.”

The Trump Justice Department appealed the ruling, but Mr. McGahn eventually did testify behind closed doors last year, after the Biden administration struck a deal with House Democrats to resolve the dispute.

But while Judge Jackson ultimately ruled against Mr. Trump in the McGahn case, she also indirectly helped him by consuming nearly a third of a year to resolve what was merely the first stage of a case that would inevitably be appealed, including writing a 120-page opinion.

Her handling of that case was a prime example of how Mr. Trump’s legal team successfully used the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on congressional oversight efforts, effectively winning despite court rulings against them. Against that backdrop, Judge Jackson’s handling of another high-profile case recently was notably more attuned to the real-world consequences of judicial delay.

After Mr. Biden elevated Judge Jackson to the appeals court in 2021, she was part of a three-judge panel that heard Mr. Trump’s challenge to a congressional subpoena for White House records related to the Capitol riot. In December, less than a month after that case was docketed before them, they ruled that Congress could see the documents. The Supreme Court this month affirmed that outcome, completing the dispute’s unusually rapid resolution.

Judge Jackson has two daughters and is related by marriage to Paul D. Ryan, the former House speaker and Republican vice-presidential candidate. Her husband, Patrick G. Jackson, is a surgeon and the twin brother of Mr. Ryan’s brother in-law. At her 2012 confirmation hearing to be a district court judge, Mr. Ryan testified in her support, calling her “clearly qualified” and “an amazing person.”

“Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal,” Mr. Ryan said. “She is an amazing person, and I favorably recommend your consideration.”

Some Democrats quickly called on Mr. Biden to uphold his pledge to nominate a Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court for the first time in American history.

“Black women in America should be able to look at the highest court in the land and finally see themselves represented,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat. “I am ready to move as quickly as possible to consider and confirm a highly qualified nominee who will break barriers and make history as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio and chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, issued a similar statement of support, though only the Senate will vote to confirm Mr. Biden’s choice. “We know that when America’s boardrooms, legislatures, and even the Supreme Court start to resemble America, we all benefit,” she said in a statement.

Several Democrats privately and publicly expressed relief that Justice Breyer had announced his plans to retire while Democrats retained control of an evenly divided Senate and the White House.

Some liberals had questioned Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the high court during President Barack Obama’s administration, rather than retiring at a time when he could have named a progressive successor. Instead, upon Justice Ginsburg’s death in 2020, President Donald J. Trump named a conservative replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and Republicans who then controlled the Senate were in a position to quickly confirm her.

“We can’t risk losing yet another seat on the high court to the radical, anti-democracy right, which is why I was the first member of Congress to call on Justice Breyer to retire nearly a year ago, and why I commend his decision to do so today,” said Representative Mondaire Jones, Democrat of New York.

Senate Republicans will be unable to prevent Mr. Biden’s pick from going forward if all 50 members of the Democratic caucus remain united in support of the nominee. But several Republicans signaled that they would use the confirmation debate to rally conservative support ahead of the midterm elections.

“I encourage the president to select a well-qualified nominee with an unwavering commitment to upholding the Constitution and respecting our nation’s system of checks and balances,” said Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana.

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Judge Breyer, who is 55 years old, has a reputation as a consensus builder and a pragmatist whose court rarely produces a dissenting opinion. He already has bipartisan support in the Senate, where he worked as an aide during the 1970’s and helped build coalitions across party lines to deregulate the airlines.

“Without dispute, he is one of the outstanding jurists of our age,” Mr. Clinton said. “He has a clear grasp of the law, a boundless respect for the constitutional and legal rights of the American people, a searching and restless intellect, and a remarkable ability to explain complex subjects in understandable terms.”

After Mr. Clinton’s announcement, Judge Breyer told reporters at the Federal Courthouse in Boston that he would try to interpret the law to benefit the lives and rights of ordinary people.

“I admire the Supreme Court enormously, because in this country people believe in law, they believe in individual rights, they believe in the Constitution, and they believe that all that matters to their lives — and they’re right,” he said.

Judge Breyer learned of his selection too late to join the president at the White House today, and officials said a formal Rose Garden ceremony for the new nominee would be held on Monday.

Mr. Clinton had repeatedly delayed the announcement of his nominee this week as he was forced until almost the last minute to weigh the political combat he might face in the Senate if he had nominated his first choice, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Just before Mr. Clinton revealed his choice, Mr. Babbitt called his staff together and told them that he had met with the president for “half the night,” starting at midnight Wednesday, to talk about the Court, the country and the Interior Department, an aide to Mr. Babbitt said. He said he ultimately advised Mr. Clinton that if he were president, he would leave Bruce Babbitt at the Interior Department.

Administration officials said political considerations were not the primary factor in the selection. But they acknowledged that with Judge Breyer, Mr. Clinton will have a nominee who is virtually guaranteed to win easy approval in the Senate, where he is still remembered for his work on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lloyd N. Cutler, the White House counsel, said that of Mr. Clinton’s three finalists — Judge Breyer, Mr. Babbitt and Judge Richard S. Arnold of Arkansas — that Judge Breyer “was the one with the fewest problems.”

When he was nominated by President Jimmy Carter for the appeals court post in 1980, Judge Breyer was vigorously supported by both Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina.

The judge’s pivotal role on a commission that drafted sentencing guidelines for Federal crimes has proven more contentious. The guidelines, which were imposed in 1987 to reduce disparities in sentencing, are widely resented, and sometimes flouted, by the Federal judges who are supposed to follow them.

Nonetheless, Judge Breyer has already been endorsed for the High Court by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who led the opposition to Mr. Babbitt. And before Mr. Clinton had even completed his announcement today, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, predicted “smooth sailing” for the confirmation.

“In Judge Breyer, President Clinton has selected a top-notch intellect and a person of integrity,” Mr. Dole said. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised Mr. Breyer’s “intellect and dedication.”

By contrast, several senators had vowed to fight the nomination of Mr. Babbitt.

Mr. Breyer’s stock began to rise late this week after Republicans began to complain about Mr. Babbitt Senators Hatch and Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, both Republicans, had announced they would vote against Mr. Babbitt because of his stance on environmental issues and their concern that he might try to legislate liberal policies from the bench. Both have spoken highly of Judge Breyer and of Judge Arnold.

The White House had longed for an uncluttered confirmation process, and Judge Breyer’s popularity in the Senate promised that.

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Slightly Defensive

Appearing before reporters on the South Lawn, Mr. Clinton offered an unusual and slightly defensive discourse on his decision, seeking to dispel any notion that, as he has done on several high-profile appointments, he had made an initial choice, allowed the nominee’s name to be known publicly and then changed his mind.

Mr. Clinton acknowledged that he had taken longer than expected to select the court’s 108th justice, but he said, “It is a duty best exercised wisely, and not in haste.”

Mr. Clinton said he believed that either Mr. Babbitt Judge Arnold, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, would “have been handily confirmed.”

But he said he “couldn’t bear” to lose Mr. Babbitt from his Cabinet and that he did not select Judge Arnold, a close friend, because he is undergoing treatment for lymphoma, a form of cancer. He also said that that he received more than 100 letters from other Federal judges who supported Judge Arnold’s nomination.

Mr. Clinton had considered and passed over Mr. Breyer last year, when he filled the slot vacated by Justice Byron R. White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Aides said at the time that Judge Breyer had failed to impress Mr. Clinton in their meeting and that they were concerned when he revealed that he had failed to pay Social Security taxes for a household worker.

But today, Mr. Clinton had only praise for Judge Breyer, remarking that any candidate who could win support from both Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch was worth nominating. He sought to portray last year’s chilly meeting with Judge Breyer as a warm session that helped him make his decision this time.

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‘Political Sensibility’

In choosing Judge Breyer, who is a graduate of Stanford University, Oxford University and Harvard Law School, over Mr. Babbitt, Mr. Clinton set aside his desire to appoint a veteran politician to the court.

He said today, however, that he believed Judge Breyer would bring a political sensibility to the court “because of his reputation as a consensus builder on a court where most of the appointees were made by Republican presidents.”

“You know, this country got started by people who wanted a good letting alone from government,” Mr. Clinton said. “I think he understands that.”

Mr. Clinton also decided against expanding diversity on the bench; like Justice Ginsberg, Judge Breyer is Jewish and from the Northeast. Among the possible nominees he bypassed were Judge Jose A. Cabranes, chief of the Federal District Court in Connecticut, who is Hispanic, and Judge Amalya L. Kearse, who sits on United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, who is black. Both were reported to be among the five finalists.

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Six Weeks of Pondering

Mr. Clinton met for six weeks with advisers about the nomination, whittling and expanding a list of choices that at one point exceeded a dozen names. During the last few days, aides said that they spent most of their time trying to determine the state of Judge Arnold’s health.

Mr. Clinton had determined that Mr. Babbitt could not be spared from the Interior Department in part because it would be difficult to replace him, aides said.

Mr. Clinton had originally intended to nominate Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the retiring Democratic leader, but Mr. Mitchell took himself out of the running, saying he wanted to devote his time this summer to enacting the president’s health care plan. Immediately after Mr. Mitchell’s withdrawal, interest groups began stepping up the pressure.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which had pressed for the appointment of Judge Cabranes, today expressed “strong disappointment” at Mr. Clinton’s decision.

Wilfredo Caraballo, the president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, called the decision to bypass Judge Cabranes “a slap in the face to all Hispanics.”

But Judge Cabranes, reached at his chambers in New Haven, praised Judge Breyer as a “treasure of the Federal judiciary,” and said the country would be well served by the appointment.

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Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, promised on Wednesday that Mr. Biden’s “nominee will receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed.”

Changes in Senate rules in 2013 and 2017 mean that a nominee can move forward and be confirmed with a simple majority. With the Senate split 50-50, Vice President Kamala Harris would be able to break a tie over any nominee, giving Democrats the upper hand as long as all 50 of the members who vote with them rally behind whomever the president chooses.

While Senate Democrats have split over some policy issues, they have been very supportive of the judicial candidates the Biden administration has put forward.

Democrats quickly called on Mr. Biden to follow through on his promise to nominate the first Black woman to the court.

“I trust President Biden to move forward an exceptional nominee who will uphold all American’s rights and liberties — including protecting voting rights and reproductive rights,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat. “I am ready to move as quickly as possible to consider and confirm a highly qualified nominee who will break barriers and make history as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Mr. Biden has been highly successful so far in nominating and confirming federal judges, but his nominees have so far drawn few Republican supporters.

But with Senate Republicans in the minority, they lack the power to erect the kind of blockade they did when they controlled the chamber in 2016, preventing President Barack Obama from even getting a hearing for his nominee to the court, Merrick B. Garland.

In a message clearly intended to rally conservative support ahead of the midterm elections, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, noted on Wednesday that Democrats “have the power to replace Justice Breyer in 2022 without one Republican vote in support.” He added, “Elections have consequences.”

The Judiciary Committee has been anticipating a potential Supreme Court showdown since Democrats took over the Senate in January and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, became the committee’s new chairman. Though he has long experience on the panel, this would be the first time he would oversee a Supreme Court confirmation.

If any Senate Democrat broke from the party on the nomination — as Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona often have on major policy issues in the Biden era — it could endanger Mr. Biden’s pick and provide cover for Republicans to be in opposition as well.

Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

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“I don’t think I’m going to stay there till I die — hope not,” he said.

As the oldest member of the court and the senior member of its three-member liberal wing, Justice Breyer has been the subject of an energetic campaign by liberals who wanted him to step down to ensure that President Biden could name his successor.

Last summer, the justice tried to sum up the factors that would go into his decision. “There are a lot of blurred things there, and there are many considerations,” he said. “They form a whole. I’ll make a decision.”

He paused, then added: “I don’t like making decisions about myself.”

His book, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics,” explores the nature of the court’s authority, saying it is undermined by labeling justices as conservative or liberal. Drawing a distinction between law and politics, Justice Breyer writes that not all splits on the court were predictable and that those that were could generally be explained by differences in judicial philosophy or interpretive methods.

In the interview, he acknowledged that the politicians who had transformed confirmation hearings into partisan brawls held a different view, but he said the justices acted in good faith, often finding consensus and occasionally surprising the public in significant cases.

“Didn’t one of the most conservative — quote — members join with the others in the gay rights case?” he asked in the interview, referring to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s majority opinion ruling that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.

Justice Breyer was asked about a remark from Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, in response to a question about whether it was “inappropriate for a justice to take into account the party or politics of the sitting president when deciding whether to step down from the court.”

“No, it’s not inappropriate,” the former chief justice responded. “Deciding when to step down from the court is not a judicial act.”

That sounded correct to Justice Breyer. “That’s true,” he said.

Justice Breyer, 83, the oldest member of the court, was appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 allowed President Donald J. Trump to appoint Justice Amy Coney Barrett as her replacement, Justice Breyer became the subject of an energetic campaign by liberals who wanted him to step down to ensure that Mr. Biden could name his successor while Democrats control the Senate.

With conservatives now in full control of the court, replacing Justice Breyer with another liberal would not change its ideological balance or affect its rightward trajectory in cases on abortion, gun rights, religion or affirmative action.

But the opening provides Mr. Biden a chance to put his stamp on the court — the last justice nominated by a Democrat was Elena Kagan by President Barack Obama nearly a dozen years ago — and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill said they intended to move quickly to begin the confirmation process once Mr. Biden selects a successor for Justice Breyer.

Their goal, they said, was to have hearings completed and a nominee confirmed in time to be sworn in soon after the court completes its current term in late June or early July, allowing Justice Breyer to serve out this term.

Democrats control the Senate by the narrowest of margins. If they were to lose even a single seat, the balance of power in the chamber would flip, making it much more difficult for Mr. Biden to win confirmation for his nominee. But as long as Democrats maintain control and stay unified behind Mr. Biden’s choice, it will be difficult for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, to derail the nomination.

“We want to move quickly,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader. “We want to get this done as soon as possible.”

It is not clear how quickly Mr. Biden will name his nominee. He pledged nearly two years ago, during the Democratic primary campaign, that he would appoint a Black woman to fill the first vacancy of his presidency, a promise the White House reiterated on Wednesday.

Justices typically announce their intention to step down in letters to the president, often making retirements contingent on the confirmation of their successors so as not to leave the court short-handed in the event of delays. Justice Breyer will presumably want to serve out the balance of the current Supreme Court term, which will include major decisions on abortion and the Second Amendment.

NBC News earlier reported that Justice Breyer planned to retire.

Speculation about whom Mr. Biden might nominate has centered on two possibilities: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who graduated from Harvard Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Breyer, and Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court, who graduated from Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens.

Some of Mr. Biden’s supporters have urged him to cast his net wider and to consider candidates without Ivy League degrees or Supreme Court clerkships but with a diversity of experience.

They pointed to, for instance, Judge J. Michelle Childs of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., a graduate of the University of South Carolina’s law school and a former law firm partner who also worked in state government. In December, Mr. Biden said he would name Judge Childs to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit, a sign that she may be a serious contender for Justice Breyer’s seat.

Justice Breyer’s opinions have been those of a moderate liberal, marked by a deference to experts, an ad hoc balancing of competing interests and an alertness to fundamental fairness. His goal, he said, was to reinforce democracy and to supply workable legal principles for a sprawling and diverse nation.

He has been more likely to vote against criminal defendants than other liberal justices. On the other hand, as the years progressed, he has grown increasingly hostile to the death penalty.

He played a starring role in the court’s last term, writing majority opinions rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act and protecting the free speech rights of a high school student. That Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. assigned those opinions to him was a reflection of Justice Breyer’s seniority, his willingness to write narrow decisions to achieve broad majorities and, perhaps, an attempt to keep him on the court a little longer.

Other members of the court also turned to Justice Breyer to execute delicate tasks. In 2016, for instance, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, as the senior justice in the majority, assigned an important abortion opinion to Justice Breyer rather than Justice Ginsburg, probably calculating that the resulting opinion would more likely be modest, technical and acceptable to five justices.

In an interview in August, Justice Breyer said he was struggling with the question of when to step down.

“There are many things that go into a retirement decision,” he said.

He recalled approvingly something Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, had told him.

“He said, ‘I don’t want somebody appointed who will just reverse everything I’ve done for the last 25 years,’” Justice Breyer recalled. “That will inevitably be in the psychology” of his decision, he said.

“I don’t think I’m going to stay there till I die — hope not,” he said.

Over the years, Justice Breyer bristled at the accusation that judges act politically. “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said in April in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”

On the bench, his demeanor was professorial, and his rambling questions, often studded with colorful hypotheticals, could be charming or exasperating. But they demonstrated a lively curiosity and an open mind.

If Mr. Biden succeeds in winning confirmation for his nominee to replace Justice Breyer, that justice is very likely to serve for decades.

Some liberals questioned Justice Ginsburg’s decision not to retire during the Obama administration in spite of her advancing age and bouts with cancer. After her death at the age of 87, just six weeks before the 2020 election, Senate Republicans pushed through the confirmation of Justice Barrett over unified Democratic opposition. That gave Mr. Trump a chance to make his third appointment to the court, cementing a 6-to-3 conservative majority.

Justice Breyer’s decision to step down may have been influenced by Justice Ginsburg’s experience.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.