President-Elect Biden’s new Chief of Staff, then a Clinton staffer and trusted former clerk for Justice Bryon White, took the first action in the series of a events that led to the confirmation of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. https://twitter.com/ronaldklain/status/975724024411099137

Justice White was a Kennedy appointee, but also one of the two Roe v. Wade dissenters and remained consistent foe of the federal constitutional abortion rights.

But he was still a Democrat, and hung on through Reagan and GHWB until the newly-inaugurated Clinton could replace him

Just a year after White voted in dissent to reverse Roe in Casey, he let a Democratic President replace him with someone who was sure to be pro-choice.

That ended up being Ginsburg.

Ginsburg’s death let Trump restore White’s anti-Roe seat with Barrett.

There remains the possibility that Klain could play a role in flipping another seat back to its original Roe vote if, say, Justice Thomas can’t hold on through a Biden Administration and somehow there’s a Dem Senate to confirm an ideological heir to Thurgood Marshall.

But even so, there would remain a conservative majority on a SCOTUS that would have no one the likes of Byron White, whose only ideology was to oppose abortion rights and support pretty much anything federal governments left or right wanted to do.

White in retirement would go on hiring a clerk a term without regard to ideology because he himself had none. One of those clerks was a Reagan-era scion, but more importantly for White, a fellow Coloradan: Neil Gorsuch.

At Gorsuch’s own confirmation hearings, his GOP Senate supporters talked up the nominee’s old boss Jusrice White, who they’d have otherwise never trusted but for one data point: https://twitter.com/mikesacksesq/status/844742895601115136