In a letter to President Joe Biden, Breyer said it had been his “great honor” to participate as a judge in “the effort to maintain our Constitution and the rule of law.”
He said Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is prepared to “take the prescribed oaths” to begin his service as the 116th member of the court.
The fact that the court will issue final rulings and orders on the same day reflects a faster timetable than previous warrants. He suggests that judges, who have been the subject of death threats since the publication of a draft opinion annulling Roe v. Wade, they are anxious for the transcendental and divisive mandate to end as soon as possible.
There are two major pending cases on the environment and immigration.
Breyer, who was appointed to court in 1994 by then-President Bill Clinton, announced his retirement plans in January. The long-awaited decision was greeted with a collective sigh of relief by Democrats, who feared the possibility of losing the seat to a future Republican president if the 83-year-old jurist ignores an intense campaign of pressure from the left, which urges him to leave. the court while Biden had a clear path to replace him.
A liberal vote consisting of the Supreme Court with an unwavering belief in the U.S. system of government and a pragmatic view of the law, Breyer has tried to focus the law on how it might work for the average citizen. He was not a fire chief and quickly said that the Supreme Court could not solve all the problems of the society. He often stressed that the court should not be seen as part of the political branches, but acknowledged that certain opinions could be unpopular.
In his final years in court, he was best known for a dissent he wrote in 2015 in a case involving execution by lethal injection. He took the opportunity to write separately and suggest to the court that he assume the constitutionality of the death penalty.
In his opinion, Breyer wrote that after spending many years in court reviewing countless death penalty cases, he had come to question whether innocent people had been executed. He also feared that the penalty would be applied arbitrarily across the country. He noted that in some cases, death row inmates could spend years, sometimes in solitary confinement, awaiting their executions.
Jackson, Breyer’s replacement, was confirmed by the Senate in April by a vote of 53 to 47, with three Republicans joining the Democrats to vote in favor. While her incorporation into the bench does not change the ideological balance of the court, Jackson will be the first black woman to serve on the country’s highest court.
This story has been updated with additional details and background information.
CNN’s Devan Cole and Wolf Blitzer contributed to this report.