Brett Kavanaugh: Where he stands on key issues

JudgeBrettM. Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has spent the past dozen years embracing the philosophy of the conservative legal movement as he assembled a record on the powerful federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

On issues as diverse as abortion and gun rights to disputes over national-security policies and business regulations, Kavanaugh emphasized textual limitations while frequently favoring corporations over regulators, and the government over individuals claiming rights violations. With a few exceptions, his pattern is typically conservative.

Here are some of the notable issues and cases he has addressed. Many of them arose from disputes over the scope and limits of the power of the federal government.

Abortion rights

In a case last fall that drew widespread attention, the appeals court voted to allow a pregnant 17-year-old in immigration detention to seek an abortion without delay; the Trump administration had wanted to first transfer her to an adult sponsor for guidance.

Kavanaugh dissented. Hewrote that while the appeals court was bound to obey Supreme Court rulings that said that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose an abortion, those precedents left room for the government to apply “reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden.”

Religion

Kavanaugh disagreed with his colleagues in a 2015 case about a part of the Affordable Care Act that required insurers to cover contraception. Under the law, employers must provide insurance to their workers or pay a fine. But employers who oppose contraception on religious grounds can bypass the requirement by submitting a form to their insurers, which then cover the workers’ contraception at no expense to the employers.

Separately, ina 2010 case, some atheists challenged the saying of a prayer at presidential inaugurations and the phrase “so help me God” in the presidential oath of office. A three-judge panel dismissed the lawsuit. Butwhile the other two judges merely said the plaintiffs had no standing, Kavanaugh weighed in on the merits.

He upheld the practice as constitutional, citing the principle that government-sponsored religious speech or prayer at public events where prayers were traditionally said do not violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishment of religion, so long as the prayers are “not proselytizing (seeking to convert) or otherwise exploitative.”

Gun rights

Kavanaugh carved out a more gun rights-friendly view than colleagues in a 2011 case arising from a challenge to a District of Columbia law that required gun owners to register and banned possession of semi-automatic rifles. While the appeals court upheld the limits as constitutionally permissible under the Second Amendment, Kavanaugh dissented.

He wrote that while the government may ban fully automatic machine guns, a ban on semi-automatic rifles should be unconstitutional because they “have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting and other lawful uses.” He also said that because registration had not traditionally been required for all lawfully possessed guns, that rule should be struck down, too.

Terrorism detainees

In several important cases brought by Guantánamo Bay detainees, Kavanaugh generally sided with the government. In habeas corpus cases, for example, he broadly interpreted the military’s power to hold people in wartime detention even when the evidence of their suspected ties to terrorism is relatively weak.

Those included a 2010 case in which he was part of a threejudge panel that kept a Yemeni detainee in custody, reversing a lower-court judge’s order. That case established a precedent that courts should consider an array of evidence even if each individual piece would be dubious when viewed in isolation. The approach made it much harder for detainees to win habeas corpus cases.

Voting rights

In October 2012, Kavanaugh was part of a three-judge panel that scrutinized a South Carolina law generally requiring voters to present government-is sued photo identification to cast a ballot. At the time, the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, like South Carolina, to receive federal permission before changing election rules to ensure that the modifications would not disproportionately suppress minority turnout. (The Supreme Court gutted that safeguard the following year.)

The Justice Department had blocked South Carolina from enforcing its law, noting that about 6 to 8 percent of African-American voters in the state lacked a photo ID, as comparedwith about 4 percent of white voters. Kavanaugh’s panel blocked the state from enforcing its law for that year’s election but upheld its use in future ones to allow time to educate voters about the requirement. Kavanaugh wrote that he was satisfied with South Carolina officials’ promise to make exceptions for voters who gave a reason for having no photo ID, saying the law “does not have the effects that some expected and some feared.”

U.S. COURTOF APPEALS VIA NEWYORK TIMES Many of the 48 clerkswhohaveworked for BrettKavanaugh have been deployed to vouch for himin a campaign coordinated byCRCPublic Relations, aWashington firm.