Skip to content Skip to search

Republish This Story

* Please read before republishing *

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license as long as you follow our republishing guidelines, which require that you credit The 19th and retain our pixel. See our full guidelines for more information.

To republish, simply copy the HTML at right, which includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to The 19th. Have questions? Please email [email protected].

— The Editors

Loading...

Modal Gallery

/
Sign up for our newsletter

Menu

  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Search
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships
    • From the Collection

      Changing Child Care

      Illustration of a woman feeding a baby a bottle
      • Washington, D.C., offers financial relief to local child care workers

        Orion Rummler · September 20
      • As climate change worsens hurricane season in Louisiana, doulas are ensuring parents can safely feed their babies

        Jessica Kutz · May 5
      • Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued abortion isn’t an economic issue. But is that true?

        Chabeli Carrazana · May 4
    • From the Collection

      Next-Gen GOP

      Illustration of a woman riding an elephant
      • Mayra Flores’ victory set a record for women in Congress. It also reflects the growing visibility of Republican Latinas

        Candice Norwood · June 21
      • A banner year for Republican women

        Amanda Becker · November 11
      • Republican women could double representation in the U.S. House

        Amanda Becker · November 4
    • From the Collection

      On The Rise

      Illustration of three women marching
      • Can Cheri Beasley build a winning coalition in North Carolina?

        Candice Norwood · October 11
      • Los Angeles has never elected a woman mayor. Karen Bass hopes to change that.

        Nadra Nittle · September 8
      • Judge J. Michelle Childs is confirmed to D.C. appeals court

        Candice Norwood · July 20
    • From the Collection

      Pandemic Within a Pandemic

      Illustration of four people marching for Black Lives Matter with coronavirus as the backdrop
      • The 19th Explains: Why the nursing shortage isn’t going away anytime soon

        Mariel Padilla · September 23
      • Some LGBTQ+ people worry that the COVID-19 vaccine will affect HIV medication. It won’t.

        Orion Rummler · November 23
      • Why are more men dying from COVID? It’s a complicated story of nature vs. nurture, researchers say

        Mariel Padilla · September 22
    • From the Collection

      Portraits of a Pandemic

      Illustration of a woman wearing a mask and holding up the coronavirus
      • For family caregivers, COVID is a mental health crisis in the making

        Shefali Luthra · October 8
      • A new database tracks COVID-19’s effects on sex and gender

        Shefali Luthra · September 15
      • Pregnant in a pandemic: The 'perfect storm for a crisis'

        Shefali Luthra · August 25
    • From the Collection

      The 19th Explains

      People walking from many articles to one article where they can get the context they need on an issue.
      • The 19th Explains: What we know about Brittney Griner’s case and what it took to get her home

        Candice Norwood, Katherine Gilyard · December 8
      • The 19th Explains: Why the Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t codify same-sex marriage rights

        Kate Sosin · December 8
      • The 19th Explains: Why baby formula is still hard to find months after the shortage

        Mariel Padilla · December 1
    • From the Collection

      The Electability Myth

      Illustration of three women speaking at podiums
      • Mayra Flores’ victory set a record for women in Congress. It also reflects the growing visibility of Republican Latinas

        Candice Norwood · June 21
      • Stepping in after tragedy: How political wives became widow lawmakers

        Mariel Padilla · May 24
      • Do term limits help women candidates? New York could be a new testing ground

        Barbara Rodriguez · January 11
    • From the Collection

      The Impact of Aging

      A number of older people walking down a path of information.
      • From ballroom dancing to bloodshed, the older AAPI community grapples with gun control

        Nadra Nittle, Mariel Padilla · January 27
      • 'I'm planning on working until the day I die': Older women voters are worried about the future

        Mariel Padilla · June 3
      • Climate change is forcing care workers to act as first responders

        Jessica Kutz · May 31
    • From the Collection

      Voting Rights

      A series of hands reaching for ballots.
      • Election workers believe in our system — and want everyone else to, too

        Barbara Rodriguez, Jennifer Gerson · November 8
      • Voter ID laws stand between transgender people, women and the ballot box

        Barbara Rodriguez · October 14
      • Emily’s List expands focus on diverse candidates and voting rights ahead of midterm elections

        Errin Haines · August 30

    View all collections

  • Explore by Topic

    • 19th Polling
    • Abortion
    • Business & Economy
    • Caregiving
    • Coronavirus
    • Education
    • Election 2020
    • Election 2022
    • Environment & Climate
    • Health
    • Immigration
    • Inside The 19th
    • Justice
    • LGBTQ+
    • Politics
    • Press Release
    • Race
    • Sports
    • Technology

    View All Topics

Home
  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Search
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships

We’re an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Read our story.

The 19th News(letter)

News from reporters who represent you and your communities.

You have been subscribed!

Submitting...

Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

Become a member

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

In this March 7, 2019 file photo, Associate Justices Paul Newby and Robin Hudson applaud for new Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, center, of the N.C. Supreme Court during Beasley's investiture ceremony in Raleigh. In North Carolina's Supreme Court chamber, above the seat held by Beasley, the second African American chief justice, hangs a towering painting of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, a 19th century slave owner and jurist who authored a notorious opinion about the “absolute” rights of slaveholders over the enslaved. In October 2018 the state Supreme Court named a commission to review the portraits in the building that houses the court ,including Ruffin's.  (Paul Woolverton/The Fayetteville Observer via AP)
North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, center, is one of 11 Black women suggested as a Supreme Court shortlist contender by Demand Justice, a judicial advocacy organization. (Paul Woolverton/The Fayetteville Observer via AP)

Election 2020

Will Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court mobilize voters?

Demand Justice aims to keep the high court in the spotlight with a candidate shortlist and ‘She Will Rise’ campaign.

Amanda Becker

Washington Correspondent

Amanda Becker portrait

Published

2020-09-16 13:54
1:54
September 16, 2020
pm

Updated

2020-09-19 11:45:00.000000

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

Editor’s note: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on September 18, 2020, renewed attention on who President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden might pick to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Even before Ginsburg’s death, progressive judicial advocacy groups, like Demand Justice, were readying a list of suggested women for Biden’s shortlist.

Progressive Democrats are aiming to amplify Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court by launching a new campaign that highlights 17 potential picks from the lower courts, advocacy organizations and academia. 

Demand Justice, a group that formed in the wake of the 2016 election, when now President Donald Trump excited Republican voters by promising to nominate conservative judges and justices, on Wednesday added 11 Black women to its Supreme Court shortlist. 

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

The progressive group is also launching a “She Will Rise” campaign — the name a nod to the poetry of Maya Angelou — that it hopes will mobilize Democratic voters in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign. 

In June 2016, 70 percent of Trump’s supporters said that Supreme Court appointments were a “very important” factor in their decision while 62 percent of those who planned to vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton said the same, according to the Pew Research Center. The same survey conducted in August 2020 showed that voters had flipped, with 66 percent of Biden’s supporters naming Supreme Court picks as “very important” versus 61 percent of Trump’s backers. 

Democratic voters are headed into the November election with 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — the court’s most senior liberal  — battling late-stage pancreatic cancer. 

Ginsburg has said she will not retire from her lifetime appointment to the nine-member court in a move to deny Trump the opportunity to fill another vacancy. But the likelihood she will depart sometime during the next president’s term is creating a political dynamic similar to the 2016 election, when Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon, died in February, creating a high-court vacancy as the presidential primaries were in full swing. 

President Barack Obama quickly nominated federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, blocked the chamber from voting on him.

McConnell said then that the next president, not Obama, should fill the vacancy, arguing that when George H.W. Bush was president, Democrats, led by Biden, who then chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, had floated the idea that any imminent vacancy should not be filled until after the 1992 presidential election. (No vacancy occurred.) Nevertheless, McConnell cited the “Biden rule” when he blocked Garland’s confirmation vote, thrusting the issue front-and-center on the 2016 campaign trail. 

As Trump got closer to securing the Republican 2016 president nomination, he released a list of potential Supreme Court picks to fill Scalia’s vacancy as a way to prove his conservative bona fides as an untraditional candidate. Focusing on the courts was an effective strategy: of the 21 percent of voters who cited Supreme Court appointments as the most important factor in their decision, 56 percent backed Trump, according to CNN exit polling. 

During his first term, Trump, with McConnell’s assistance, has delivered on his promise to nominate conservative jurists to the country’s courts. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been installed during Trump’s presidency as have more than 200 federal judges. Trump reiterated last week that “apart from matters of war and peace, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is the most important decision an American President can make.”

Trump has now appointed more federal appeals court judges than any other president; his appointees now make up more than a quarter of all active federal judges overall; and, though he has appointed more women jurists than his Republican predecessors, Trump’s picks still skew White and male, according to Pew Research Center analysis of government data. 

Demand Justice’s “She Will Rise” initiative, officially launching with an event on Monday, will highlight that “the White male experience has defined the moral compass that undergirds our laws and policies.”

“Appointing a Black woman to the Supreme Court is the next and necessary step towards a truer form of democracy and ensuring that our unique experiences and perspectives are represented,” said Kimberly Tignor, a Demand Justice adviser and member of the cohort of Black women behind the “She Will Rise” campaign. 

New members of the cohort include authors Glory Edim, Minda Hart, Donna Hylton and Morgan Jenkins; actresses Tiffany Boone and Audra McDonald and Brittany Packnett, a former member of Obama’s policing task force and the Ferguson Commission. 

The Black women newly added to Demand Justice’s Supreme Court shortlist are North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley; Rutgers University law professor Elise Boddie; Kristen Clarke with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Fatima Goss Graves with the National Women’s Law Center; U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson; Oregon Supreme Court Associate Justice Adrienne Nelson; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Associate Director-Counsel Janai Nelson; L. Song Richardson, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine; Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns; G. Helen Whitener, an associate justice on Washington’s Supreme Court; and U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota Judge Wilhelmina Wright.

Demand Justice’s previous Supreme Court shortlist included former public defenders, academics and plaintiffs lawyers, with some Black women among them. They started keeping the list before Biden secured the presidential nomination in order to “prod” Democratic candidates into considering progressive court picks.

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

The 19th News(letter)

News from reporters who represent you and your communities.

You have been subscribed!

Submitting...

Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

Become a member

From the Collection

On The Rise

Illustration of three women marching
  • Can Cheri Beasley build a winning coalition in North Carolina?

    Candice Norwood · October 11
  • Los Angeles has never elected a woman mayor. Karen Bass hopes to change that.

    Nadra Nittle · September 8
  • Judge J. Michelle Childs is confirmed to D.C. appeals court

    Candice Norwood · July 20

Up Next

Dawn Wooten, left, a nurse at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, speaks at a Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020 news conference in Atlanta protesting conditions at the immigration jail. Wooten says authorities denied COVID-19 tests to immigrants, performed questionable hysterectomies and shredded records in a complaint filed to the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (AP Photo/Jeff Amy)

Race

A whistleblower complaint alleging ‘high rate’ of hysterectomies in ICE detention centers parallels grim U.S. history

The allegations call to mind a history of sterilization laws in the United States dating back to the early 1900s that usually targeted the poor, disabled and women of color.

Read the Story

The 19th
The 19th is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Our stories are free to republish in accordance with these guidelines.

  • Donate
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Search
  • Jobs
  • Fellowships
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
  • Community Guidelines
  • Membership
  • Membership FAQ
  • Major Gifts
  • Sponsorship
  • Privacy
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram