'This Court is this Court': Expert foresees no future Supreme Court nominations for President Joe Biden

On April 7th, 2022, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime appointment as the first Black woman Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Jackson was nominated by President Joe Biden on February 20th to replace liberal Associate Justice Stephen Breyer after he announced his retirement from a twenty-eight-year tenure on the bench. Jackson was sworn in on June 30th.

The Court's two other left-wing Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were respectively added in 2009 and 2010 by then-President Barack Obama. His third pick – Merrick Garland, the current attorney general – was denied a hearing by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) because McConnell deemed the timing to be too near to the 2016 presidential election, which former President Donald Trump won.

McConnell brazenly abandoned his own standard while Trump was in office, and Trump went on to add three conservative Associate Justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett was selected and quickly confirmed following the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before the 2020 presidential election, resulting in a lopsided 6-3 right-wing supermajority.

On Sunday's edition of Face the Nation, a discussion ensued over the prospects of Biden choosing new jurists. CBS Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford believes that Biden's chances of getting additional nominations are slim.

"Well, if we're talking about retirements, I guess I will predict – I guess I'm gonna retire," she joked as the panelists bantered about the topic. "No, I don't think we have any retirements from the Supreme Court. That is not big news, right? Nobody thinks they are gonna retire. But I see this Supreme Court staying intact – not only through the end of President Biden's first term – but if he were to be reelected, I do not think he gets another Supreme Court nomination."

Crawford further noted that the Court's rightward shift has already begun to have an enormous impact on the American legal landscape, and stressed that this reality is unlikely to end anytime soon:

This Court is this Court. You've got six conservative Justices. They're going to overturn affirmative action in college admissions like I said earlier. And it's the Court we're going to have for a while. Whether it will be the Court that is the longest in the history of nine Justices to go without a change of membership, I don't know. That was eleven years. That was after Justice Breyer joined the Court in 1994. But it will be this Court for some time, so people can get used to some different rulings.