VOA News by Masood Farivar 5/1/2019
President Donald Trump has boasted that adding two conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court is among his biggest achievements.
Except that one of Trump’s picks hasn’t quite followed the script.
Since being sworn in last October, Justice Brett Kavanaugh has defied the expectations of some by occasionally breaking with the court’s conservative bloc to join liberals such as Justice Stephen Breyer.
An analysis of Kavanaugh’s 22 early decisions shows that he’s stuck close to Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been gradually carving a more moderate path during the Trump era.
"The expectation was that he would probably be in the same or similar voting sections with his conservative colleagues more often than he would be with his liberal colleagues," said Adam Feldman, a court watcher who runs the blog Empirical SCOTUS.
Feldman, who conducted the analysis, said "the fact that [Kavanaugh] joined with the liberals in a higher percentage of decisions, in total, this term is somewhat surprising."
To be sure, it’s too early to draw conclusions based on such a small number of cases. Still, conservatives are less effusive of Kavanaugh’s record compared with Trump’s other pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Gorsuch is often compared to the late Antonin Scalia, the court’s conservative intellectual anchor whom he replaced in 2017, while Kavanaugh veers to the right of Anthony Kennedy, the centrist former justice whose seat he occupies.
"Justice Kavanaugh, so far has been cautious in the sense that he usually almost always joins the majority," said Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice.
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