There’s nothing like a Supreme Court vacancy to muster out the conservative circular firing squad. As Ed Whelan noted yesterday, Ben Shapiro had some ill-advised criticisms of the odds-on front-runner to replace Justice Kennedy, the D.C. Circuit’s Brett Kavanaugh. Ed does his usual thorough job of taking down Shapiro’s criticism of Kavanaugh, and I’ll not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that more than a decade on the D.C. Circuit, often somewhat facetiously called the “second highest court in the land,†has yielded sufficient evidence that Brett Kavanaugh deserves his place on any Supreme Court short list. He has an impressive record of fidelity to the Constitution, with particularly impressive opinions in the realm of separation of powers (his opinion invalidating the vesting of unchecked power in a single director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a tour de force), the Second Amendment, and religious liberties.
The latest attack on Kavanaugh comes from the Judicial Action Group, a nonprofit group run by Roy Moore lawyer and campaign spokesman Phillip Jauregui. Judicial Action Group ranks Kavanaugh among the “worst prospects†among the purported short-listers, apparently concluding that Kavanaugh is insufficiently skeptical of the constitutional right to abortion. But much like the result in the Alabama Senate race, this argument doesn’t — and can’t — bring the goods...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/brett-kavanaugh-conservative-judge-supreme-court/
