Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right's big coup
Supreme Ambition has already earned the president’s ire. In a 24 November tweet, Donald Trump trashed the book, its author and her employer: “The Ruth Marcus book is a badly written & reseached [sic] disaster. So many incorrect facts. Fake News, just like the Washington Post!” If the tweeterin-chief had actually read it, he would probably be even more enraged.
Apparently, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s appointees to the supreme court, don’t have the greatest regard for him. In the run-up to election day 2016, Kavanaugh let it be known that “he thought Trump was a buffoon”, Marcus writes. As for Gorsuch, the first appointee, in a conversation with Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Trump nemesis, he termed the president’s derisive remarks about the judiciary in the aftermath of the travel ban rulings “demoralizing” and “disheartening”. Gratitude and subservience go only so far.
Marcus, a veteran Post reporter now deputy editorial page editor, delivers a highly readable 496-page account of Kavanaugh’s nomination, the surrounding machinations within the White House and Congress, and the decades-long campaign waged by the right to wrest control of the judiciary.
Although she is unsympathetic to the GOP’s endeavor, her book is amply sourced and footnoted. It is meticulous in detail and credible in content.
Most memorable is her revelation that 14 months before he would leave the bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh’s former boss, lobbied Trump to elevate the appeals court judge. As Marcus described things, Kennedy’s “message to the president was as consequential as it was straightforward, and it was a remarkable insertion by a sitting justice into the distinctly presidential act of judge picking”. Kennedy has not issued a denial.
Supreme Ambition offers a possible additional glimpse into Kennedy’s thinking. Marcus reports that at a gathering of Washington’s high and mighty, the Alfalfa Club dinner, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Gregory Kennedy, the justice’s son, approached the White House aide Kellyanne Conway and conveyed that “no one … was happier about the election” than his father.
In fairness, the author also records the younger Kennedy’s email denial that he ever spoke to Conway about his father’s “views about the election or any other subject”. Notably, he does not deny meeting Conway. Justice is not always blind.
The appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were not isolated events. Rather, they marked a culmination of a concerted effort by movement conservatives to remake the courts in their image. While abortion was very much part of their agenda, so was stymying the administrative state and rolling back the New Deal.
A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, Marcus recalls that last spring, the court’s conservative flank signaled interest in undoing the legislative legacy of the Great Depression as unconstitutionally broad delegations of congressional authority. In the words of Justice Samuel Alito: “If a majority of this court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort.” At the time, the Chief Justice John Roberts and Clarence Thomas conveyed similar sentiments.
This past Monday, Kavanaugh flashed that he was there too, making that five justices in all, a majority. Expressly invoking a Gorsuch dissent, Kavanaugh observed that the “constitution’s nondelegation doctrine … may warrant further consideration in future cases”. Paraphrasing the late chief justice William Rehnquist, he announced: “Major national policy decisions must be made by Congress and the president in the legislative process, not delegated by Congress to the executive branch.”
In other words, fetuses weren’t the only reasons that large checks were being cut to the Federalist Society, or that constitutional originalism had become the civic religion of the right. FDR’s legacy had to be gutted. Social security may no longer be so secure.
As Supreme Ambition makes clear, Trump delivered on his campaign promises, in large measure, because of the efforts of Don McGahn, his now estranged former counsel, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and a one-time McGahn patron. In the face of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Kavanaugh, whom she accused of sexual assault, it was the two men, along with former president George W Bush, who effectively held the line.
The nominee angrily denied the allegation but a worried Trump watched the reviews of Ford’s performance and phoned McGahn. He refused to pick up. McGahn explained his insubordination to his deputy, Annie Donaldson: “I don’t talk to quitters.” As framed by Marcus, “the most important man in the world could not get through to his own lawyer”.
Although McGahn and McConnell remained steadfast, other players did not. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner “both told the president, ‘Get rid of Kavanaugh and start over’”, according to one White House adviser quoted by Marcus. Even Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society suffered from periodic bouts of pearl clutching.
Never a “big Brett fan”, the man who did much to shape Trump’s court picks became “nervous” about Kavanaugh in the days preceding his nomination. Then as Ford’s allegations became public, like Javanka, Leo raised the possibility of pulling the nomination.
As for Trump’s view of Leo, it was hardly kind: “Who’s this little fucking midget?” Marcus’s reporting is consistent with Michael Wolff’s depiction in Siege of Trump coming to suspect he was being played by Leo and McGahn.
Marcus reserves her own thoughts about Kavanaugh for the end. She acknowledges the evidence against him is far from a slam dunk and does not accuse him of lying. Instead, she posits that what was “so searing to Ford was a passing frolic to Kavanaugh”. Having been heavily intoxicated, according to Ford, Kavanaugh simply didn’t remember the incident.
As for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Marcus contends that it “discredited the White House and Senate” and that Kavanaugh’s “tenure will forever have an asterisk attached – a blot on Kavanaugh and the court that is, to use Christine Blasey Ford’s phrase, indelible”.
Perhaps. Less than a year from now, the American electorate will give its verdict on this and so much else.