As shown in a forthcoming study of how Chevron is applied on lower courts, Judge Kavanaugh is quite evenhanded, applying the same approach whether evaluating agency actions that could be characterized as liberal or conservative.

 

There is little doubt the Supreme Court will extend its turn to the right if Judge Brett Kavanaugh joins the bench this fall. But Judge Kavanaugh’s connection with nearly every justice, and his reputation as a straight-shooter even among those who disagree with him, suggests he would make the ride as smooth as possible.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence will appropriately be dissected in the months ahead. I’d like to speak to a less well-known side of the Supreme Court nominee: his role as a mentor for young lawyers, particularly women. The qualities he exhibits with his clerks may provide important evidence about the kind of justice he would be.

The political left is going to do whatever it can to defeat Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and the smears have begun even earlier than usual. This week’s mud on the wall includes a claim of guilt by association when Mr. Kavanaugh was a law clerk 27 years ago.

…It used to be that the press required at least some evidence to report a story, but now a politically motivated group can write a memo without incriminating facts and get it reported as news. Fair-minded Americans should treat it as the drive-by innuendo it is.

Brett Kavanaugh presents the most palatable option Democrats could have expected. After all the drama and histrionics, sensible Democrats should put politics aside and vote to make him the ninth member of the Supreme Court.

Less than 48 hours after being nominated to the supreme court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh quietly joined a group of volunteers on Wednesday to hand out food to Washington D.C. homeless.

Even though he had so recently been thrust into the national spotlight by being named on Monday by President Trump to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh still kept the commitment to serve at the event at Catholic Charities in downtown Washington D.C., which he had signed up for months earlier.

Brett Kavanaugh is an intelligent and deliberate judge who is poised to become a conservative thought leader on the U.S. Supreme court. His record on the appellate court suggests that President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy will maintain a commitment to interpreting the law as it is written, and not how he may wish it had been crafted.

If one were to create an ideal résumé for the position of Supreme Court justice, it would not look terribly different from Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s curriculum vitae.

Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination now heads to the Senate, and the most important fact to understand is that the debate in the world’s greatest nondeliberative body is not about the future of the Supreme Court. That’s a sideshow. The real debate is about the future of the Senate—specifically, which political party will control that now narrowly divided chamber in 2019.

Those qualities of judicious reason and care have been amply on display over the 12 years of Kavanaugh’s service on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, sometimes known as the nation’s second-highest court. During that time, Kavanaugh has shown that he stands in a long tradition of jurists — that of Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Harlan and Stewart — who deeply respect both the democratic process and the structural principles undergirding our constitutional republic, while honoring the elaborately enumerated protections of “We the People” enshrined in the Bill of Rights.