Get to know the name Brett M. Kavanaugh, because he may well be our next Supreme Court Justice, or at least nominee. He checks off all the boxes that I knew existed, conservative, anti-abortion, etc. But, he also checks off a box that must have been on the other side of the page. Cavanaugh comes through even if there’s a box requiring him to have recently written a law review article offering an extremist view of presidential power.
I’m not being de minimis when I say “extreme.” Via Raw Story.
A president should not have to face “time-consuming and distracting” investigations or lawsuits because they “ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.”
That practically screams “Mr. Justice Kavanaugh.” But you can’t really appreciate the above “concern” without drinking in the rank hypocrisy of the man who wrote it, given that Judge Kavanaugh served as one of Kenneth Starr’s top deputies. Yes, it is true.
Kavanaugh, 53, grew up in Washington and is the favorite of many conservative lawyers there. He went to Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court for Kennedy alongside Neil Gorsuch – we all know where he sits in chambers now. Kavanaugh was a top deputy to independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the long investigation of President Clinton, and he drafted the Starr Report that led to Clinton’s impeachment. He also joined the legal team that represented George W. Bush in the fight over the recount in the 2000 presidential election.
Did I mention that he check off all the boxes? From the L.A. Times:
“He is much more conservative in his approach to law than Justice Kennedy,” said Justin Walker, a University of Louisville law professor who clerked for Kavanaugh at the appeals court and Kennedy at the Supreme Court. “There is no guesswork with Judge Kavanaugh. He is extremely predictable.”
And, sadly, as I noted before, he’s deeply blacked in the square – not just a check – on the anti-abortion side of things:
Kavanaugh was involved in a quick-moving dispute over whether a migrant teenager in Texas could be released from immigration custody to obtain an abortion. A federal judge cleared the way, but Kavanaugh wrote a 2-1 decision siding with Trump administration lawyers and blocking the abortion for up to 10 more days. The full appeals court intervened and overturned his ruling. In dissent, he faulted his more liberal colleagues as wrongly creating a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain abortion on demand.”
Trump likely has “boxes” full of judges with the same conservative bona fides, but I seriously doubt many of them have written legal treatises on the unconstitutionality of criminally investigating presidents while in office. Mr. Kavanaugh has.
I suspect there’s a good chance we’re looking at our next Supreme Court justice nominee.
On the other hand, if the Democrats and a few others can’t get together and block a man like Kavanaugh, especially given the gross conflict of interest, rendering an opinion in a law review article castigating presidential investigations as unconstitutional, then there never was hope anyway.
By the way, I wonder if he noted the unconstitutional nature of his report when he wrote the Report on Clinton for Mr. Starr.
****Twitter weekend, @MiciakZoom, don’t get left behind. We’re spreading our wings again. I’d be honored if you’d follow me.
