President-elect Joe Biden confirmed Thursday that he will appoint jurist Merrick Garland as Secretary of Justice and Attorney General of the United States, whom Republicans denied a seat on the Supreme Court five years ago.
Garland, a judge at the Court of Appeals, is recognized as a moderate liberal and is not aligned with any political party.
However, Republican senators blocked for eight months in 2016 the order of then-President Barack Obama to nominate him to the Supreme Court, allowing President Donald Trump the following year to appoint a Conservative magistrate to fill the vacancy.
Garland and other key Justice Department officials will be introduced by Biden this Thursday, the president-elect’s transition team said in a note.
The 68-year-old Garland has a long career as a lawyer in the private sector and was a solicitor general.
In 1993 he was appointed assistant attorney general to the Department of Justice, where he handled serious national security cases, including the bombings in Oklahoma City and the Atlanta-96 Olympics.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed him to the Washington Court of Appeals, and he received widespread support from Democratic and Republican senators in his confirmation.
He became chief judge of this court in 2013, ien March 2016 Obama chose him to take a seat on the Supreme Court after the death of Antonin Scalia. But that nomination did not prosper.
His new appointment should find no further difficulty in the Senate, where Democrats now have a tight majority and where he will likely also garner Republican support.