Kavanaugh: The Perfect Choice for the Season of Resistance

[Right_in_Virginia]

Kavanaugh: The Perfect Choice for the Season of Resistance
Another top-notch Supreme Court nomination from President Trump.
American Spectator, Jul 11, 2018, Dov Fischer

<snip>

July 2018 is not the season for a Scalia appointment. By contrast, it is precisely the season for a Brett Kavanaugh appointment. Not only do Judge Kavanaugh’s writings reflect a solidly conservative approach to jurisprudence, though less overtly partisan and combative than was Justice Scalia’s style, but he is the right person for the right moment. Republicans nurse a razor-thin 51-49 majority in the United States Senate. The GOP threw away its seat in Alabama. It seems that Senator McCain will not give up his seat so that the Republican governor of Arizona may replace him, and yet Sen. McCain also may not be on hand to vote. That makes it 50-49. Rand Paul is idiosyncratic. Lisa Murkowski of conservative Republican Alaska needs to be satisfied that the nominee is not driven secretly to overturn Roe v. Wade. Susan Collins has that same concern, and she also has an electorate who live in Maine. Yet conservatives insist on a justice who will not countenance abortion on demand, will protect Second Amendment rights, will not let the federal government shove regulations down the throats of industry without considering the full gamut of financial and social costs, and will protect religious liberties and freedoms. Meanwhile, Democrats swore to oppose the nominee before the embryo even was fertilized. . . . .

Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions are good to read; they are solid and smart. And there are 300 of them. Unlike David Souter, it is too late in the day for Judge Kavanaugh to hide his views. And his opinions reflect that he supports religious rights and liberties, even to the degree of opposing Obamacare impositions on religious groups that required them to submit paperwork to have their insurers pay for employees’ birth control instead of their paying. On abortion, he rejected the Left’s race to find a new Constitutional right for under-age unlawful immigrants to have an immediate abortion. He seems steadfastly pro-Second Amendment. And he would not kowtow to an Obama-era EPA regulation where the EPA failed to go through an administrative finding that would balance the economic cost of the new regulation.

What makes this pick so perfect is that the numbers do allow the GOP to win this fight, but it is a nail-biter, no slam dunk. We cannot afford to lose Rand Paul or Bob Corker or Jeff Flake, so the nominee has to be such a good human being at his very core that Republican Trump-haters would feel ashamed of themselves for superimposing their anti-Trump animus against such a good soul. It has to be someone with a pristine record, unblemished in jurisprudence and in personal life, so clean that CNN gets stuck with having to re-focus on the missing Malaysian airliner and doing specials on Anthony Bourdain. Also someone who unequivocally has not been disdainful of stare decisis (the principle that established law, even when decided under suspect situations, cannot be overturned perfunctorily to accommodate a new zeitgeist). In fact, he co-authored with Justice Gorsuch and others The Law of Judicial Precedent, a treatise defending the principle of stare decisis. How genius of President Trump and his advisers is that? Thus, to keep Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski on board, Brett Kavanaugh is probably as far to the right as Trump can go.


More:  https://spectator.org/kavanaugh-the-perfect-choice-for-the-season-of-resistance/

[darroll]

Gee, I wonder why I never heard of him before? 

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

"We cannot afford to lose Rand Paul or Bob Corker or Jeff Flake"

This is what Bipartisan has done to us.

I have never, not once, voted for the 'Bipartisan' candidate nor has anyone I know.

[thackney]

Gee, I wonder why I never heard of him before? 

Perhaps because he isn't a media hound or created controversy?

Others have been looking at him before this time.

Empirical SCOTUS blog sees Brett Kavanaugh as likely SCOTUS nominee
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/empirical_scotus_sees_brett_kavanaugh_as_likely_scotus_nominee
DECEMBER 12, 2017

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Holding Court
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/holding-court

Bett M. Kavanaugh is a judge who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is often described as the second most important court in the country. President George W. Bush nominated Kavanaugh to that post in 2003, when he was just thirty-eight years old, but the judge’s renown dates back to a few years before that. Kavanaugh was a protégé of the former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and a principal author of the Starr Report, the investigative bodice ripper that transfixed the reading public in the autumn of 1998. As a prosecutor, Kavanaugh set a bracing literary standard (“On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts . . .”), but his work as a judge may be even more startling.

Late last year, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit voted, two to one, to uphold President Obama’s health-care reform, known as the Affordable Care Act (aca). Kavanaugh dissented, primarily on the ground that the lawsuit was premature. In a sixty-five-page opinion, Kavanaugh appeared to offer some advice to the Republicans who are challenging Obama in the election this year. “Under the Constitution,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the President may decline to enforce a statute that regulates private individuals when the President deems the statute unconstitutional, even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional.”

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Setting the Record Straight: The ABA Finds Brett Kavanaugh Is "Indeed Qualified to Serve on the Federal Bench"
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060508-20.html

"In 42 votes cast in the three ABA reviews, all 42 found Mr. Kavanaugh to be well qualified or qualified to serve on the DC Circuit. The ABA itself says that even the lowest of the three ratings is, in its words, 'a very high standard.'"