By COLLEEN LONG, ZEKE MILLER and DARLENE SUPERVILLE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is meeting Thursday with retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer at the White House, lauding his long Supreme Court service and formally announcing Breyer’s decision to retire.

The two are to deliver remarks in the Roosevelt Room a day after news broke of the 83-year-old Breyer’s upcoming retirement. He made it official on Thursday; the Supreme Court sent out his retirement letter just before the two were to meet.

The president is considering at least three judges for the expected vacancy on the Supreme Court as he prepares to quickly deliver on his campaign pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the nation’s highest court.

Since Biden took office in January 2021, he has focused on nominating a diverse group of judges to the federal bench, not just in race but also in professional expertise. He installed five Black women on federal appeals courts, and three more nominations are pending before the Senate, their experience ranging from civil rights work to federal defense.

By the end of his first year, Biden had won confirmation of 40 judges, the most since President Ronald Reagan. Of those, 80% are women and 53% are people of color, according to the White House.

Breyer’s replacement by another liberal justice would not change the ideological makeup of the court. Conservatives outnumber liberals by 6-3, and Donald Trump’s three nominees pushed the court even further to the right

Early discussions about a successor are focusing on U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss White House deliberations. Jackson and Kruger have long been seen as possible nominees.

“He has a strong pool to select a candidate from, in addition to other sources. This is an historic opportunity to appoint someone with a strong record on civil and human rights,” said Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president.

Jackson, 51, was nominated by President Barack Obama to be a district court judge. Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Early in her career, she was also a law clerk for Breyer. Biden has already met with her personally, he interviewed her for her current post.

Childs, a federal judge in South Carolina, has been nominated but not yet confirmed to serve on the same circuit court. Her name has surfaced partly because she is a favorite among some high-profile lawmakers, including Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.

Kruger, a graduate of Harvard and of Yale’s law school, was previously a Supreme Court clerk and has argued a dozen cases before the justices as a lawyer for the federal government.

Breyer, 83, will retire at the end of the summer, according to sources who confirmed the news to The Associated Press on Wednesday. They spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to preempt Breyer’s formal announcement.

But the Senate can confirm a successor before there is a formal vacancy, so the White House is getting to work. It is expected to take at least a few weeks before a nomination is formalized.

When Biden was running for the White House, he said that if he had the chance to nominate someone to the court, he would make history by choosing a Black woman. And he’s reiterated that pledge since.

“As president, I’d be honored, honored to appoint the first African American woman. Because it should look like the country. It’s long past time,” Biden said in February 2020 shortly before South Carolina’s presidential primary.

Adding a Black woman to the court would mean a series of firsts — four female justices and two Black justices serving at the same time on the nine-member court. Justice Clarence Thomas is the court’s only Black justice and just the second ever, after Thurgood Marshall.

And Biden would have the chance to show Black voters increasingly frustrated with a president they helped to elect that he is serious about their concerns, particularly after he has been unable to push through voting rights legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Biden’s nominee “will receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed.”

Republicans remain upset about Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious 2018 hearing. Still, Democrats have the 50 votes plus a tiebreaker in Vice President Kamala Harris that they need to confirm a nominee.

Republicans who changed the Senate rules during the Trump-era to allow simple majority confirmation of Supreme Court nominees appeared resigned to the outcome. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an influential Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, “If all Democrats hang together — which I expect they will — they have the power to replace Justice Breyer in 2022 without one Republican vote in support.”

Nonetheless, Democrats have also been unable to get all their members on board for Biden’s social and environmental spending agenda or to move forward with a voting rights bill.

As a senator, Biden served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, overseeing six Supreme Court confirmation hearings from 1987 to 1995, including Breyer’s.

And one person who will be central to Biden’s process is chief of staff Ron Klain, a former Supreme Court law clerk and chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee.

Biden could also choose someone who is not currently a judge, though that seems less likely. One contender would be the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, 59. She has headed the fund since 2013 and has announced she is stepping down in the spring.

The Supreme Court has had three women on it for more than a decade, since 2010, when Obama named Justice Elena Kagan to replace the retiring John Paul Stevens. Kagan joined Obama’s other nominee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina justice, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When Ginsburg died in September 2020, Trump announced his choice of Amy Coney Barrett eight days later.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wild volatility in the stock market this week has put heightened scrutiny on the Federal Reserve’s meeting Wednesday and whether the Fed will clarify just how fast it plans to tighten credit and potentially slow the economy.

With high inflation squeezing consumers and businesses, the Fed is expected to signal that it will raise its benchmark short-term interest rate in March in a dramatic reversal from the ultra-low-rate policies it imposed during the pandemic recession. To further tighten credit, the Fed also plans to end its monthly bond purchases in March. And later this year, it may start reducing its huge stockpile of Treasury and mortgage bonds.

Investors fear there may be still more to come. Some on Wall Street worry that on Wednesday, the Fed may signal a forthcoming half-point increase in its key rate. There is also concern that at a news conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell could suggest that the central bank will raise rates more times this year than the four hikes most economists expect.

Another wild card — particularly for Wall Street — is the Fed’s bond holdings. As recently as September, those holdings were growing by $120 billion a month. The bond purchases, which the Fed financed by creating money, were intended to reduce longer-term rates to spur borrowing and spending. Many investors saw the bond buying as helping fuel stock market gains by pouring cash into the financial system.

Earlier this month, minutes of the Fed’s December meeting revealed that the central bank was considering reducing its bond holdings by not replacing bonds that mature — a more aggressive step than just ending the purchases. Analysts now forecast that the Fed could begin shrinking its holding as early as July, much sooner than was expected even a few months ago.

The impact of reducing the Fed’s bond stockpile isn’t well known. But the last time the Fed raised rates and reduced its balance sheet simultaneously was in 2018. The S&P 500 stock index tumbled 20% in three months.

If, as expected, the Fed raises its key rate in March by a quarter-point, it would lift the rate to a range of 0.25% to 0.5%, up from near zero. The Fed’s moves are likely to make a wide range of borrowing — from mortgages and credit cards to auto loans and corporate credit — more expensive. Those higher borrowing costs, in turn, could slow spending and weaken corporate profits. The gravest risk is that the Fed’s abandonment of low rates, which have nurtured the economy and the financial markets for years, could trigger another recession.

Those worries have sent stock prices fluctuating wildly. The Dow Jones average plunged more than 1,000 points during Monday’s trading session before recovering and finishing with a modest gain. On Tuesday, the S&P 500 closed down 1.2%. Steady declines since the start of the year have left the S&P down nearly 10% — the level that investors define as a “correction.”

Economists have forecast that when the Fed does start allowing some of its $8.8 trillion in bond holdings to roll off its balance sheet, it will do so at a pace of $100 billion a month. By not replacing some securities, the Fed in effect reduces demand for Treasuries. This raises their yields and makes borrowing more expensive.

Yet some analysts say they aren’t sure how big the impact on interest rates will be or how much the Fed will rely on reducing its balance sheet to affect interest rates.

“There is a fair bit of uncertainty about what to expect,” said Michael Hanson, global economist at JPMorgan Chase.

Gennadiy Goldberg, U.S. rates strategist at TD Securities, said that Wall Street has also been unnerved by the sharp jump in the inflation-adjusted interest rate on the 10-year Treasury. That rate has jumped by one-half a percentage point just this month, an unusually swift rise.

All of which means Powell will face a delicate and even risky balancing act at his news conference Wednesday.

“It’s a threading-the-needle story,” Goldberg said. “They want to continue to sound hawkish — just not so hawkish as to create extreme market volatility.”

If the stock market is engulfed by more chaotic declines, economists say, the Fed might decide to delay some of its credit-tightening plans. Modest drops in share prices, though, won’t likely affect its plans.

“The Fed does not at all mind seeing a repricing of risk here but would want to see it in an orderly fashion,” said Ellen Gaske, lead economist at PGIM Fixed Income, a global asset manager.

Some economists have expressed concern that the Fed is already moving too late to combat high inflation. Others say they worry that the Fed may act too aggressively. They argue that numerous rate hikes would risk causing a recession and wouldn’t slow inflation in any case. In this view, high prices mostly reflect snarled supply chains that the Fed’s rate hikes are powerless to cure.

This week’s Fed meeting comes against the backdrop of not only high inflation — consumer prices have surged 7% in the past year, the fastest pace in nearly four decades — but also an economy gripped by another wave of COVID-19 infections.

Powell has acknowledged that he failed to foresee the persistence of high inflation, having long expressed the belief that it would prove temporary. The inflation spike has broadened to areas beyond those that were affected by supply shortages — to apartment rents, for example — which suggests it could endure even after goods and parts flow more freely.