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The Senate knew about Kavanaugh's partisan history. It confirmed him anyway.
Outlook • Perspective
The Senate knew about Kavanaugh’s partisan history. It confirmed him anyway.
‘What goes around comes around,’ the future justice warned. Now it really could.
By Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of "Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court."
September 16, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Nearly three years after his confirmation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh remains a deeply divisive figure, the best-known but least-popular justice on the Supreme Court. Occasionally, his votes or some news story will renew the bitter sense among many Americans that he got away with a lie in denying Christine Blasey Ford’s and Debbie Ramirez’s allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as a third such accusation, from his Yale years, that Senate Republicans all but bottled up.
Earlier this summer, reports said the Justice Department had confirmed that, in 2018, the FBI received more than 4,500 tips against Kavanaugh and sent “relevant” ones to the Trump White House, where they disappeared. This month, Kavanaugh joined the 5-to-4 ruling allowing a Texas antiabortion bounty-hunting law to take effect, though it plainly violates court precedents upholding a constitutional right to abortion. To many, that provided further evidence — along with his previous support for a Louisiana antiabortion law — that he’d bamboozled Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who provided the linchpin vote for his confirmation after he assured her that he respected those precedents as “settled law.”
Yet Kavanaugh’s credibility was suspect even before the sexual misconduct allegations. The Senate had received plenty of evidence, at an earlier hearing on his nomination, that he had at best misled senators and possibly lied under oath in 2004 and 2006, when he was a nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, about matters suggesting just what a partisan operator he’d been as a young lawyer. The hearing record signaled that Kavanaugh was a Republican with an ax to grind long before his televised tirade in 2018 dismissing the misconduct allegations as a Democratic “political hit” — payback for Donald Trump’s election and Kavanaugh’s role in Ken Starr’s Javert-like pursuit of the Clintons.
{snip}
There {on the Supreme Court} the 56-year-old justice remains, for life if he chooses, to decide the most momentous issues confronting the nation — including, perhaps, the outcome of future elections.
Twitter: @jackiecalmes
The Senate knew about Kavanaugh’s partisan history. It confirmed him anyway.
‘What goes around comes around,’ the future justice warned. Now it really could.
By Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of "Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court."
September 16, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Nearly three years after his confirmation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh remains a deeply divisive figure, the best-known but least-popular justice on the Supreme Court. Occasionally, his votes or some news story will renew the bitter sense among many Americans that he got away with a lie in denying Christine Blasey Ford’s and Debbie Ramirez’s allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as a third such accusation, from his Yale years, that Senate Republicans all but bottled up.
Earlier this summer, reports said the Justice Department had confirmed that, in 2018, the FBI received more than 4,500 tips against Kavanaugh and sent “relevant” ones to the Trump White House, where they disappeared. This month, Kavanaugh joined the 5-to-4 ruling allowing a Texas antiabortion bounty-hunting law to take effect, though it plainly violates court precedents upholding a constitutional right to abortion. To many, that provided further evidence — along with his previous support for a Louisiana antiabortion law — that he’d bamboozled Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who provided the linchpin vote for his confirmation after he assured her that he respected those precedents as “settled law.”
Yet Kavanaugh’s credibility was suspect even before the sexual misconduct allegations. The Senate had received plenty of evidence, at an earlier hearing on his nomination, that he had at best misled senators and possibly lied under oath in 2004 and 2006, when he was a nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, about matters suggesting just what a partisan operator he’d been as a young lawyer. The hearing record signaled that Kavanaugh was a Republican with an ax to grind long before his televised tirade in 2018 dismissing the misconduct allegations as a Democratic “political hit” — payback for Donald Trump’s election and Kavanaugh’s role in Ken Starr’s Javert-like pursuit of the Clintons.
{snip}
There {on the Supreme Court} the 56-year-old justice remains, for life if he chooses, to decide the most momentous issues confronting the nation — including, perhaps, the outcome of future elections.
Twitter: @jackiecalmes
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