Protests go on outside; business as usual inside

WASHINGTON >> A small group of protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday for the debut of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but inside the hushed and stately courtroom it was business as usual.

There was more laughter than stern words during two hours of oral arguments, and Kavanaugh was an active participant in his first sitting with his new colleagues.

Chief Justice John Roberts noted Kavanaugh’s arrival with the court’s traditional welcome: “Justice Kavanaugh, we wish you a long and happy career in our common calling,” Roberts said.

From there, the court plunged into three cases that called on them to decipher the Armed Career Criminal Act, passed by Congress in 1984 and designed to get people with a history of violence off the streets by enhancing prison terms.

It provides stiffer penalties for those who are convicted in federal court of possessing firearms if they have previously been found guilty of violent felonies or serious drug offenses. But deciding what constitutes a violent felony is often difficult because state laws do not always match up precisely.

Stokeling v. United States involved a Florida man who said his conviction for snatching a necklace from someone’s neck should not count as a violent felony.

Kavanaugh did not join his colleagues in colorful hypotheticals testing what sorts of offenses would qualify a crime as a violent felony involving the use or threat of physical force.

The second half of the argument involved burglaries, which can be considered violent felonies. The Supreme Court has said such a crime takes place in a “building or structure.” But laws in Tennessee and Arkansas, among others, are broader and include mobile homes, RVs and other vehicles in which people sleep.

Again came the hypotheticals. Sotomayor asked: What if someone burglarized a car that basically serves as a home for a homeless person?

Kavanaugh resisted Stanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher’s point that the law was vague about what constituted a structure.

“I think if you’re convicted three separate times of breaking into an RV ... you would be on some notice that you shouldn’t be possessing a firearm under federal law,” Kavanaugh said.

Those cases are United States v. Stitt and United States v. Sims.

Wearing the same black robe he wore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh, 53, seemed at ease, and at the end of arguments, Justice Elena Kagan, seated next to him, offered a handshake.

Kavanaugh’s family — his parents, Martha and Ed, and his wife, Ashley, and two daughters — were in attendance.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Activists protest in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday. A Supreme Court with a new conservative majority took the bench as Brett Kavanaugh joined his new colleagues to hear his first arguments as a justice.