Brett Kavanaugh is quite a piece of work. He not only participated in drunken revels as a young person, he’s quite proud of it all. His good buddy Mark Judge, who was the alleged onlooker in the room when the 17 year old Kavanaugh was assaulting a then-15 year old Christine Blasey, wrote a book about being a teenaged alcoholic, wherein a thinly veiled Kavanaugh appears as “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who “puked in someone’s car” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” Kavanaugh himself later boasted of drunken hijinks in a speech at Yale Law School. Mother Jones:
Anyway, toward the end of the evening a friend of mine who shall remain nameless—and this is a story that is really about a friend of mine, not about me where I am disguising myself as a friend of mine—my friend broke a table in the Lawn Club reception area. Smashed it into multiple pieces. I actually still possess a photo of him sprawled on the floor on top of the table. How’d did he break it, you might ask? The old-fashioned way. He lost his balance and fell into the table, drink in hand, and the table collapsed. My friend was a big guy.
Now, you might think that we would have quickly left the Lawn Club after that, with some sense of shame. But you’d be wrong. My friend actually tried to get another drink at the bar. Proving something I have always known—that bartenders have a lot more common sense than many law school students—the bartender refused to serve my friend.
But that’s where one of our many fond memories of Yale Law School came in. Professor Steve Duke, who himself might have had a few cocktails, came to the rescue and told my friend that he would take care of the situation and argue his case to the bartender. His actual words, as we recalled the other day, were “I’ll take your case.” And sure enough, Steve Duke—or as we called him for reasons too bizarre to recall now, the Dukie-stick—won the case and got my friend some more beers. That’s probably one Professor Duke deserved to lose. The moral of this story: I suppose there are a lot of them. But here’s one I like: Don’t ever let it be said that Yale Law professors are not there when you most need them.
“You would think we would have left the Lawn Club, with some sense of shame,” but no, they did not. The narrative here is clear: Kavanaugh and his mates were a group of entitled young turks, who believed that they could do whatever they wanted, and did, and somebody else was always there to clean up the mess.
This same elitism is reflected in his court opinions. He supports warrantless surveillance and the rights of the government over the rights of the individual citizen, just to name a few issues where his elitist attitudes bleed through. Politico:
Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote a concurring opinion in 2015 when the court declined to rehear a case affirming the legality of the NSA’s warrantless phone metadata collection program. The operation, exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, “is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote, citing the “third-party doctrine” that says records collection from a service provider like a phone company does not constitute a search of the customer. (Months earlier, Congress had enacted a law requiring the NSA to stop collecting the records itself and begin requesting them from the phone companies.) Furthermore, he wrote, a “critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”
Five years earlier, Kavanaugh dissented from the court’s decision not to reconsider its ruling that authorities had violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights by placing a GPS tracker on his car without a warrant. The ruling was “inconsistent” with judicial precedent, Kavanaugh and other Republican appointees argued. According to them, the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his public movements, and so the court should have heeded a 1983 Supreme Court ruling that allowed warrantless monitoring of a vehicle’s physical movements. [Note: In this case, video monitoring was discussed with respect to expectation of privacy. Having a GPS tracker put on your car is very different from just being photographed while driving down the street.]
Fascist dystopia, here we come. Kavanaugh is another one of these silver spoon in mouth candidates who is way above the common man — like Trump, except Trump runs the fiction of being the friend of the downtrodden and the stupidest of them buy it. Kavanaugh will grind the little man under his heels if he gets a chance. He wants the one percenters to have it all, and government to be in charge. We don’t need “Bart O’Kavanaugh” and his out of control frolics, nor do we need anybody on the Supreme Court who has proven himself with ruling after ruling to exalt the dominion of the privileged few over the individual liberties of the vast majority. He’s a terrible candidate for all kinds of reasons and he should not be confirmed.
