Democrats are preparing a mad-dash confirmation for President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court pick, fearful that with an evenly divided Senate, the door to act could close at any moment.

Now, they just need Biden to do something he’s historically struggled with: move fast and send them a name.

Just hours after the retirement announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the president was already facing increased pressure to get the gears of the nomination and confirmation processes moving. While Biden has said he intends to make his choice by the end of February, his history of missing major deadlines is causing concern. And some Democrats concede they’re already worried that a single illness, death or retirement could throw it all into chaos.

“You don’t know what the circumstances may bring, whether it’s the loss of a member or somebody crossing over to the other party,” said former Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who led the last evenly-split upper chamber. “That’s something that ought to be very much on their minds right now.”

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement gives President Joe Biden a chance to make his first nomination to the high court. It’s also a chance for Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to be a justice.

Some things to know about the women seen as leading candidates:

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

Ketanji Brown Jackson has known Breyer for decades. A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law school, she was a law clerk to Breyer from 1999 to 2000. She is comfortable enough with her former boss to have a little fun at his expense. In 2017, after Breyer accidentally brought his cellphone to court and it rang, Jackson introduced him at an event and pretended to get a call mid-introduction from Breyer’s colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Talks between former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and the House select committee investigating January 6 remain on ice nearly two months after the panel gave him a second chance to appear or face possible contempt charges.

Clark has not heard from the committee since his deposition was delayed in early December but still expects to invoke the Fifth Amendment when that meeting takes place, a source familiar with the situation tells CNN.

The committee moved late last year to hold Clark in contempt of Congress for defying his subpoena but then gave him another opportunity to meet with House investigators. That deposition then was postponed because of a “medical condition” that prevented him from participating.

Top aide to Mark Meadows met with January 6 committee
The committee has been tight-lipped about any plans related to Clark since mid-December, but another source familiar with the investigation tells CNN they expect his appearance to be rescheduled very soon.

Whatever issues Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have caused for President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, their records on Biden’s judicial confirmation efforts are a positive signal for the President as he seeks to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

Neither Manchin nor Sinema has voted against any of Biden’s lower court nominees so far — including Biden’s picks for the federal judiciary who have attracted significant Republican heat.

Manchin and Sinema stuck with the rest of the Democratic caucus when Republicans were united against the confirmation of Jennifer Sung to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals — a confirmation that required the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to move forward.

Manchin in particular has attracted liberal ire for holding up Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan, and both the West Virginia Democrat and Sinema voted against Democrats’ efforts to end the use of the 60-vote filibuster on voting rights legislation. But the filibuster isn’t in play for Supreme Court votes anymore.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on Thursday formally notified President Joe Biden of his intent to retire at the end of this year’s Supreme Court term, according to a letter released by the court.

Breyer told Biden in a letter that he had decided to retire from the Supreme Court at the end of the term “assuming that by then my successor has been nominated and confirmed.”

“I enormously appreciate the privilege of serving as part of the federal judicial system — nearly 14 years as a Court of Appeals Judge and nearly 28 years as a Member of the Supreme Court,” he said and added that the work has been “challenging and meaningful.”

He said that his relations “with each of my colleagues have been warm and friendly” and that he has been aware “throughout” of the “great honor of participating as a judge in the effort to maintain our Constitution and the rule of law.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been talking to all the usual suspects as the United States rallies other countries to stare down a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Britains, Frances and Germanys of the world are, of course, on that list.

But Ukraine’s plight also has come up in Blinken’s conversations with some less obvious countries: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for instance. Brazil, too. Blinken and other Biden administration officials have even raised Ukraine with countries like India, Japan and South Korea.

The outreach underscores both the breadth and complexity of the Biden administration’s diplomatic offensive against Moscow. It is a flood-the-zone effort that has seen virtually all of Biden’s top foreign policy aides play a role, from CIA Director William Burns’ visits to Moscow and Kyiv to an array of ambassadors in Europe and beyond checking in with counterparts. The goal is to impress upon other nations that Russia’s actions could set a dangerous precedent while undermining global norms about state sovereignty.

“It’s a ‘go everywhere’ strategy because a renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine would have implications everywhere,” a senior State Department official said.

When tens of thousands of Russian troops started moving toward the Ukrainian border late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively issued an ultimatum: They won’t go home until he had “concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO.”

This week, as the US and Russia exchange formal diplomatic letters, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”

But few have been asking why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would want to move east in the first place. What was once a Cold War security pact has become a 21st-century organization with global military commitments and ever more member countries from Eastern Europe. Members of the alliance didn’t always foresee its expansion and, three decades ago, some of America’s most renowned foreign policy thinkers argued that NATO should be nowhere near Ukraine.

Ukraine is a former Soviet republic. It isn’t joining NATO anytime soon, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, NATO’s open-door policy — the alliance’s foundational principle that any qualified European country could join — cuts both ways. To the West, it’s a statement of autonomy; to Russia, it’s a threat. The core of the NATO treaty is Article 5, a commitment that an attack on any country is treated as an attack on the entire alliance — meaning any Russian military engagement with a hypothetical NATO-member Ukraine would theoretically bring Moscow into conflict with the US, the UK, France, and the 27 other NATO members.

President Joe Biden said Thursday that 14.5 million Americans got private health insurance for this year under the Obama-era health law, thanks to help from his administration.

“Health care should be a right, not a privilege, for all Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “We are making that right a reality for a record number of people, bringing down costs and increasing access for families across the country.”

But progress could prove fleeting if congressional Democrats remain deadlocked over Biden’s social agenda package. Biden’s earlier coronavirus relief bill has been providing generous subsidy increases that benefit new and returning customers by lowering premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The enhanced financial assistance is temporary. It will go away at the end of 2022 without congressional action to extend it additional years or make it permanent.