Nominee has probed scandals, issues

Kavanaugh helped investigate Clinton, wrote dissents on gun rights, abortion

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has sat on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit since 2006. In that time, he has written a number of dissenting opinions on hot-button issues.

Kavanaugh was just 38 when he was first nominated to a federal appeals court in Washington. But before he made it to the appeals court, his career traveled an unusual path through Washington’s scandals.

After clerking for three judges, including retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh received a bracing introduction to the city’s culture when he was hired by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, in 1994 and tasked with investigating the death of deputy counsel Vince Foster and drafting parts of the report that led to Clinton’s impeachment.

He worked on the 2000 Florida recount litigations that ended in a Supreme Court decision handing the presidency to George W. Bush. And he served as a White House lawyer and staff secretary to Bush, working on the selection of federal judges and legal issues arising from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“If there has been a partisan political fight that needed a good lawyer in the last decade, Brett Kavanaugh was probably there,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said at Kavanaugh’s first confirmation hearing, in 2004.

But Kavanaugh, 53, has also formed lifelong friendships with liberals, many of whom praise his intellect and civility. In his professional life, before he became a judge, he was often a moderating force.

Working for Starr, Kavanaugh concluded that Foster had in fact killed himself. He opposed the public release of the narrative portions of Starr’s report detailing Clinton’s encounters with a White House intern. As staff secretary to Bush, he said in 2006, he strived to be “an honest broker for the president.”

As a judge, though, he has been a conservative powerhouse, issuing around 300 opinions. His dissents have often led to Supreme Court appeals, and the justices have repeatedly embraced the positions set out in Kavanaugh’s opinions.

In Heller v. District of Columbia, a pivotal 2011 Second Amendment case, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion when the D.C. Circuit Court upheld a District of Columbia ordinance banning most semi-automatic rifles.

Kavanaugh argued that the Second Amendment included the right to own semi-automatic rifles. Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court has found that handguns — “the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic” — are constitutionally protected.

In 2017, Kavanaugh was involved in Garza v. Hagan, a case that touched on the hot-button issues of abortion and immigration.

The dispute was over whether a teenager who was in the U.S. illegally could be released from immigration custody to obtain an abortion. After a federal judge found she could be released, Kavanaugh wrote a panel decision blocking the abortion for up to 10 more days. The full appeals court overturned that ruling.

In 2015, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion from the appeals court’s denial of a full court rehearing of a ruling against a religious-liberty challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate, Priests for Life v. HHS.

Kavanaugh wrote that the mandate infringed on the rights of religious organizations.

“When the Government forces someone to take an action contrary to his or her sincere religious belief (here, submitting the form) or else suffer a financial penalty (which here is huge), the Government has substantially burdened the individual’s exercise of religion. So it is in this case,” Kavanaugh wrote.