In the SCOTUS sweepstakes, Rep. Jim Clyburn, to whom Biden owes his political life, was backing Judge Michelle Childs, and he got a number of Republicans on board with her because she’s not particularly ideological or ambitious compared to the two lefty candidates, Leondra Kruger and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Lefties understood that splitting their backing between two candidates was a bad strategy, so now they’ve settled on Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is somewhat less ideological than Kruger.

Now Biden will have to choose between Childs, for the black vote, and Jackson, for the leftist vote.

President Joe Biden is on the cusp of picking a Supreme Court nominee, and a dozen progressive groups are revealing their preferred candidate among the finalists: U.S. Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In a Wednesday letter to Biden led by the courts-focused Demand Justice, the 12 groups nudge him to nominate someone with a background working as a public defender or in civil rights.

“As you consider your most important judicial nomination to date, we urge you to build on your commitment to professional diversity by appointing someone with civil rights or public defense experience to the Supreme Court,” they write in the letter, as first reported by NBC News.

The letter comes one day after NBC News and other outlets reported that Biden has interviewed two other finalists in addition to Jackson: U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger. Of the three, only Jackson has the background that the progressives mention in the letter.

Demand Justice was the group that pressured Breyer to retire and boasted of bullying him off the bench. Now they’d like to collect.

Demand Justice has already produced ads to support Jackson in case she’s chosen, a source familiar with the matter said.

No doubt.

Biden gets to choose between alienating Clyburn or the Left and deciding which will hurt him more in the primaries, should he even manage to get that far.

The smarter move would be to keep Clyburn’s support, but choosing Jackson who, unlike Kruger, is black, won’t offend black voters, and may appease the Left. The trouble, as most Dems have learned, is the Left doesn’t stay appeased.