President Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh For Supreme Court Justice
Dear Friends & Neighbors,
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (presented at: WindermereSun.com)
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Much remains to be seen as the process of confirmation proceeds.
To get to know about Brett Kavanaugh, please refer to the excerpt from wikipedia, in italics, below:
Brett Michael Kavanaugh (born February 12, 1965) is an American judge and former secretary. He currently serves as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was White House Staff Secretary during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Kavanaugh has been nominated to become an Associate Justice for the United States Supreme Court.
An attorney working for Ken Starr, Kavanaugh played a lead role in drafting the Starr Report, which urged the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh led the investigation into the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster. After the 2000 U.S. presidential election, in which Kavanaugh worked for the George W. Bush campaign in the Florida recount, Kavanaugh joined Bush’s staff, where he led the Administration’s effort to identify and confirm judicial nominees.
Kavanaugh was nominated to the D.C. Appeals Court by Bush in 2003. His confirmation hearings were contentious and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed in May 2006 after a series of negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators.
Kavanaugh was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, following the vacancy created by the pending retirement of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy.
- Kavanaugh has stated that he considers Roe v. Wade binding under the principle of stare decisis and would seek to uphold it, but has also ruled in favor of some restrictions for abortion
- In November 2011, Kavanaugh dissented when the D.C. Circuit upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), arguing that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case. After a unanimous panel found that the ACA did not violate the Constitution’s Origination Clause in Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services (2014), Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc.
- After Kavanaugh wrote for a divided panel striking down a Clean Air Act regulation, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed 6–2 in EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, L.P. (2014). Kavanaugh dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc of a unanimous panel opinion upholding the agency’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and a fractured Supreme Court reversed 5 to 4 in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency (2014). After Judge Kavanaugh dissented from a per curiam decision allowing the agency to disregard cost–benefit analysis, the Supreme Court reversed 5–4 in Michigan v. EPA (2015).In 2015, Kavanaugh found that those directly regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) could challenge the constitutionality of its design. In October 2016, Kavanaugh wrote for a divided panel finding that the CFPB’s design was unconstitutional, and made the CFPB Director removable by the President of the United States. In January 2018, the en banc D.C. Circuit reversed that judgment by a vote of 7–3, over the dissent of Kavanaugh.
- n 2014, Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment when the en banc circuit found that Ali al-Bahlul could be retroactively convicted of war crimes, provided existing statute already made it a crime “because it does not alter the definition of the crime, the defenses or the punishment”. In October 2016, Kavanaugh wrote the plurality opinion when the en banc circuit found al-Bahlul could be convicted by a military commission even if his offenses are not internationally recognized as war crimes under the law of war.In Meshal v. Higgenbotham (2016), Kavanaugh concurred when the divided panel threw out a claim by an American that he had been disappeared by the FBI in a Kenyan black site.
- In 2009, Kavanaugh wrote an article for the Minnesota Law Review where he argued that U.S. Presidents should be exempt from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits and investigations, which “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.” This article garnered attention in 2018 when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign is the subject of an ongoing federal probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
- Several academic studies that have attempted to measure judges based on their ideology or “Scalia-ness” have included Kavanaugh.One study “derived ideology scores for the D.C. Circuit judges based on lawyers’ (who practiced before these judges) perceptions of the judges’ political preferences”, with Kavanaugh ranked as the fifth (out of 11) most conservative judge on the court. The same study noted Kavanaugh’s “ability to toe a moderate line while ruling predominantly conservatively”, as well as “his moderately conservative behavior and his high level of agreement with the other judges on the circuit”. The study further observed that “[c]ompared to the recent addition of Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court … Judge Kavanaugh uses less originalist and textualist language in his opinions although he is well-versed in statutory interpretation.”FiveThirtyEight used Judicial Common Space scores, which are not based on a judge’s behavior, but rather the ideology scores of either home state senators or the appointing president, to find that Kavanaugh would likely be more conservative than Justices Alito and Gorsuch, but less conservative than Justice Thomas, if placed on the Supreme Court. The Washington Post‘s statistical projections predicted that all of Trump’s announced candidates were “largely statistically indistinguishable” and estimating that Kavanaugh would place ideologically between Justices Gorsuch and Alito.
If Kavanaugh is confirmed, by all accounts, we are most likely to see decades of conservative rulings to take place at Supreme Court.
Gathered, written, and posted by Windermere Sun-Susan Sun Nunamaker
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