Barack Obama is reportedly vetting federal judge Jane Kelly among his nominees for the supreme court, a choice that would pit a top Republican against the judge he lauded for her work in his home state of Iowa.

Like other potential justices whose names have leaked to the press, Kelly would put Republicans in an awkward position should the president nominate her. Republicans have vowed to delay and block any potential replacement for Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice who died last month and influenced the court for nearly 30 years.

Senator Chuck Grassley, as chairman of the committee that would hold hearings, would face a particularly awkward conundrum with Kelly’s nomination. His party would ask him to deny hearings to a judge he gladly endorsed for her current seat, on the eighth circuit court of appeals, while he faces re-election in the state that Kelly worked in as public defender for almost two decades.

Should Obama nominate Kelly, he would be proposing a fourth woman for the nine-seat court, and the first justice in decades who built his or her career as a public defender, rather than in academia, corporate law or as a prosecutor.

Kelly does, however, fit in the elite Harvard-Yale club of the sitting justices. Like five of the current justices she attended Harvard Law, from which she graduated with Obama in the class of 1991.

Kelly began working in Iowa’s federal public defender’s office in 1994, and built a formidable reputation as a defender of the poor and the occasional high-profile suspect, such as Luke Helder, a college student accused of planting pipe bombs in mailboxes across five states in 2002. Kelly successfully argued that Helder was unfit for trial due to mental illness.

Two years later, Kelly made headlines for her own story: she was brutally attacked while jogging down a wooded trail, her body left in a creek. Two passersby found her, and though she eventually recovered from her injuries she was unable to identify her attacker. After returning to work she won the John Adams Award for her commitment to criminal defense.

“After having that happen to her, she went right back to work sticking up for the constitutional rights of people accused by the federal government,” the former Iowa senator Tom Harkin told the Des Moines Register last month.

“To me, that was a mark of real character and sort of inner strength and resolve that something like that was not going to make her throw in the towel.”

Harkin campaigned hard for Kelly’s selection to the eighth circuit in 2013, describing her at the time as “a brilliant legal mind” who brought “a critically important perspective” to the court.

The Senate unanimously confirmed Kelly to the eighth circuit in 2013. Before the vote, Grassley read from a letter written by his friend David Hansen, a retired judge for whom Kelly had clerked.

“She is a forthright woman of high integrity and honest character,” Grassley read, adding that she has an “exceptionally keen intellect”.

“I congratulate Ms Kelly on her accomplishments and wish her well in her new duties,” Grassley added on his own. “I am pleased to support her confirmation and urge my colleagues to join me.”

Senator Chuck Grassley, far right, meets President Obama along with other congressional leaders on Tuesday to discuss the supreme court vacancy. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

On Tuesday, Grassley and the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, met the president to discuss nominations. They left the Oval Office unmoved, saying in a statement that any nominee in an election year would be “bad for the nation”.

Grassley made the opposite argument in at least one election year, urging senators in 2008 to “get our job done and confirm these nominees”, referring to picks by the Republican president George W Bush.

Democrats have also played politics with supreme court nominations, perhaps most notably when the then senator Joe Biden argued in 1992 that George HW Bush, the Republican president, should wait until election day passed to nominate anyone to the court. There were no vacancies on the court at the time.

Only once in US history has the Senate blocked nominations to the court for more than 340 days, as Republicans have promised to do. Over the course of 391 days in 1969 and 1970, senators rejected two of Richard Nixon’s nominees, until they unanimously settled on a third.

The White House declined to confirm reports of any potential nominee, though a source speaking on condition of anonymity told the New York Times that the FBI has conducted background interviews on Kelly.

Grassley has suggested he would be open to meeting nominees, and Kelly specifically, though not necessarily in the context of a hearing. A handful of other Republicans have hinted they might break from the party’s adamant position, including Senator Orrin Hatch, who spoke with the president on Wednesday.

Hatch has heaped praise on two other judges whose names are now being floated for the supreme court, Sri Srinivasan and Merrick Garland. During their respective confirmation hearings to the DC circuit court, Hatch called Srinivasan “terrific” and said that Garland’s “intelligence and his scholarship cannot be questioned”.

Srinivasan, 49, has been rumored as a likely nominee, considering his time clerking for two Republican appointees, his experience as deputy US solicitor general, and his 97-0 confirmation in 2013. Garland, 63, led the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bomber, and although his age makes him a less likely candidate is considered a moderate whom Republicans might find acceptable.

Another rumored nominee, Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada, withdrew his name from consideration last month after reports that Obama might nominate the Republican to stymie his Senate opposition.