High court nominee’s carefully constructed life
WASHINGTON — 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.
If he wins confirmation, he’ll be seated with Justice Elena Kagan, the Obama-era 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.
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 life of talent and privilege.
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.
“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.
Kavanaugh heads into 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.
His father’s son?
E. Edward Kavanaugh, 77, was a fixture in the Washington influence game years before Trump began calling it a swamp. Brett Kavanaugh’s dad lobbied for the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance
Association, the national trade group for companies making personal care products.
He fought against government regulation and advocates who wanted cosmetics-testing stopped on animals, calling those activists “zealots who cannot comprehend that a child’s life is more important than a dog’s.”
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who tangled with the dad in hearings over potential health risks of cosmetics, finds the son’s record on regulation also troubling. “You don’t have to look at his genes,” Wyden told the Associated Press. “Just look at his record.”
An AP review of Kavanaugh’s dozen years on the D.C. appeals court and his wider public record shows him opposed to a variety of regulations, on greenhouse gases and more, as well as to the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established after the 2008 financial crisis, and to administration policies that circumvent Congress and risk “a runaway executive branch.” Yet he is deferential to the presidency, an approach that raises questions about whether he would protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible coordination between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia if that matter came before the high court.
Up the ladder
Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s career progression: law clerk for federal appeals judges, fellowship with then-Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, law clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, associate counsel in the Starr investigation, law-firm partner, Bush White House associate counsel, White House staff secretary, judge. He first dated Ashley Estes, then Bush’s personal secretary, on Sept. 10, 2001; they married in 2004 and have two daughters.
He’s from a wealthy family. In 2005 his father earned just over $13 million in compensation and a send-off retirement package as the cosmetic group’s president. But his own family’s finances are apparently modest.
Public disclosure forms for 2017 showed only two investments, together worth a maximum of $65,000, along with the balance on a loan of up to $15,000. As well, the White House said he had $45,000 to $150,000 of credit card debt in 2016, some of it from buying season tickets to the Washington Nationals for himself and several friends. That debt was paid off by last year, the White House said, and Kavanaugh was reimbursed for the friends’ tickets.