High court pick Kavanaugh and his carefully constructed life
WASHINGTON (AP) — Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s life seems as carefully constructed as the Supreme Court arguments he will hear if he is confirmed to the high court. He checks all the boxes of the ways of Washington, or at least the way Washington used to be.
He’s a team player — the conservative team — stepping up to make a play at key moments in politics, government and the law dating to the Bill Clinton era and the salacious dramas of that time.
Yet in a capital and a country where politics has become poisonously tribal, Kavanaugh has tried to cover his bases, as Washington insiders have long done. He’s got liberal friends, associates and role models. He was a complicated figure in the scandal-ridden 1990s, by turns zealous and restrained as an investigator.
If he wins confirmation, he’ll be seated with Justice Elena Kagan, the Obamaera solicitor general who hired him to teach at Harvard when she was dean of the law school, as well as with his prep school mate, Justice Neil Gorsuch. Kavanaugh’s law clerks have gone on to work for liberal justices. He’s served with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in mock trials of characters in Shakespeare plays, a night out from the real-life dramas. Amateur athlete, doer of Catholic good works, basketball-coaching dad, Yale degrees, progression from lawyer to White House aide to judge — it’s all there in a rarefied life of talent and privilege, though strikingly not one of great personal wealth.
The only skeleton in Kavanaugh’s closet that the White House has owned up to is as American as apple pie.
Spending on baseball games helped drive him into debt one year, the White House said. He’s also been ribbed for hoarding gummy bears when he worked as an aide to President George W. Bush. Because Republicans are not releasing critical documents for the Senate hearings that begin Tuesday, it remains to be seen if anything else is rattling around.
To critics, like Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee lining up to question him, Kavanaugh’s collegial disposition is “Much Ado About Nothing” (Kavanaugh’s 2012 mock trial for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, Ginsburg presiding).
“From the notorious Starr report, to the Florida recount, to the president’s secrecy and privilege claims to post-9/11 legislative battles including the Victims Compensation Fund, to ideological judicial nomination fights, if there has been a partisan political fight that needed a very bright legal foot soldier in the last decade, Brett Kavanaugh was probably there,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now Senate Democratic leader, said in 2006 hearings that preceded Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
His judicial record since? With some ideological mashup, it’s been conservative in the main, reflecting views that could swing the court right on abortion, gay rights, executive power and more for decades to come.
Kavanaugh heads into the hothouse of confirmation hearings representing the hopes of President Donald Trump and the right that he will do just that. One question from senators, whether expressed or implied, will be how far the apple fell from the tree.