meet with several of the top candidates. ketanji brown jackson, the president already met with her last february, actually, when he nominated her to that d.c. circuit court of appeals. but the other candidates, those meetings will be crucial, of course, crucial step in this nomination and confirmation process. justice breyer will have served 28 years on the court by the time he formally steps down. we should note he was approved by 87 votes, quite a different change in the landscape in washington today. jessica schneider and jeremy diamond, thank you. well, while president biden has dealt with interparty politics with its legislative agenda, holdout senators joe manchin and kyrsten sinema always voted with party for biden s lower court nominees. and not inconsequential fact, but like all votes in the senate, a slight margin, biden s first challenge to a nominee will likely come from the senate judiciary committee. melanie zanona with us now. melanie, the republicans have a
reiterate once again his plans for nominating breyer s successor, which is to say he does indeed plan to nominate a black woman to be first black woman on the supreme court of the united states. that s something that the white house press secretary said yesterday, the president is it is a pledge the president still stands by. and so we re already a short list of candidates has emerged, including judge ketanji brown jackson, california supreme court justice leondra kruger to name a couple of them. president biden has been silent, they didn t want to give the appearance of pressuring justice breyer to retire from the court. that hasn t stopped the process of picking his successor from beginning at the white house. some of the vet be has been under way. the short list of candidates has already begun to emerge. and so ultimately president biden, what he has to do, is to
democrats tried the quorum strategy with amy coney barrett, but republicans got around it. reporter: right, exactly. when you have the control of the senate, you can get around these things. understood. melanie, thank you so much. let s take a closer look at these nominees. eight black women on the short list of potential nominees. yeah, let s begin with ketanji brown jackson and her confirmation hearing, the front-runner, the d.c. circuit court judge, jackson last year biden appointed jackson to the second most powerful federal court in the nation. the d.c. court of appeals. when you become a judge, you take an oath to look only at the law in deciding your cases, that you set aside your personal views about the circumstances, the defendants, or anything else. brown got a couple republican votes in her confirmation there. jackson recently signed an opinion ordering trump white
it cost me well into $140, $150 to fill up. reporter: when you look at that price, what do you think? i think it sucks. it can put me out of business. there are some jobs that i don t even take now because it costs me too much to get there. reporter: now, about half the drivers we spoke to say that they see the gas prices, they pay it, they don t think anyone has any control over it. the other half of drivers we spoke to say that they think that the federal government and president joe biden can and should do something about these high prices. the president authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the country s strategic petroleum reserve. that may help a little bit. but beyond that, there is nothing that he really can do except to maybe pressure the world s biggest oil producing nations, that s opec, to release more oil into the global marketplace. but jim and bianna, opec says they don t plan to do that and that directly affects the high
president biden will appear together at the white house today to officially announce that retirement. admittedly this is all rolled out a bitt unconventionally. the last time we saw a retirement was in 2018 when justice anthony kennedy went to the us who, informed president trump and then an official announcement came out from the court that afternoon. that was at the end of the term in june 2018. this time, however, we know that justice breyer did convey to the white house last week that he planned to step down from the court, but we know that he didn t tell president biden directly and as of yesterday, we know that the white house had not actually formally received a letter from breyer making his retirement intention official. even when it is officially announced, probably later today, justice breyer, we know, will not leave the court before the end of the term. that s still five months away. there are a lot of consequential decisions to come. we have cases on abortion rights, gun ri