Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanuagh Didn't Answer All of Our Questions
You like drama? Stories with strong female voices? Shade in spades? Then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings are the show for you—oh, also because they’ll directly, and significantly, affect your life. Unfortunately, this bit of must-see TV airs when most everyone’s working or watching their kids, so we’ll be here to recap each day of these monumentally important proceedings.
Here’s the good news about Brett Kavanaugh, who looks likely to be the country’s next Supreme Court justice: He is great on carpool duty! Also, probably an attentive listener at parent-teacher conferences! This much, we have been told.
All week, during his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh was painted as the nice guy. We heard about his commitment to hiring and mentoring women, his standing volunteer date at a local soup kitchen, and his passion for coaching girls’ basketball. All week, Republican senators, Kavanaugh’s colleagues, and the judge’s own unfailingly polite demeanor reminded us: This is a normal man. This is the dad next door.
The theme reached its saturation point today, when Rebecca Taibleson, a former clerk of Kavanaugh’s, pointed out that he’s a “regular at his local bar, where he’s partial to a Budweiser and a hamburger.”
I like beer and hamburgers and nice people. After watching over 30 hours of Kavanaugh-TV, I am thoroughly sold on the fact that he is a hoot at a neighborhood BBQ.
PHOTO: Drew Angerer
But here’s the bad news for anyone concerned about reproductive freedom, unchecked presidential power, or common sense gun reform: He refused to address his views on any of them. I heard his jump shot extolled this week, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s nothing compared to his duck. He dodged just about every opportunity to say something of substance.
Perhaps the most bizarre example of this: Kavanaugh repeatedly name-checked four landmark Supreme Court decisions, calling them “the four greatest moments in Supreme Court history.” But whenever someone asked him if these personal faves of his were “correctly decided,” he refused to say. Great, but not correct? Sounds like a MAGA hat went to law school.
Is there a protocol-related reason that might make Kavanaugh feel unable to confirm that something he just said is great is great? Maybe. But is it possible that this is all comical, tragic shadiness? I’m just a regular gal who likes Budweiser and beer, so what do I know?
And that’s not the only question I have. As a result of this weeklong shade brigade—brought to you by your own taxes, by the way—I still have several questions about Brett Kavanaugh, and you should too.
What was the point of all that relentless branding of Kavanaugh this week? Being nice to women and following precedent is to Kavanaugh as Calabasas is to Kim Kardashian—in other words, essential to his new brand. This was driven home hard all week. In the short term, this was likely meant to pacify whichever American women aren’t protesting his nomination yet. But it has a second, long-term purpose. If Kavanaugh gets on the Court, and casts ice-cold votes against women’s health interests, he’ll want us to remember that as a dude, he actually loves women. Awesome, cool. I’ll think of him fondly when I have to smuggle my birth control in from Toronto.
But wait—does he always follow precedent? If you ask him, abso-frickin’-lutely! (Frickin’ is for sure as crass as this guy gets.) But if you ask other knowledgeable parties: Not so much, especially when it comes to matters of same-sex marriage and abortion. When questioned on both topics, Kavanaugh repeatedly referenced specific decisions as the legal last word on the subjects—even though there were more recent cases expanding or clarifying the Court’s opinion on them. If that sounds complicated, you can read more about it here—but suffice to say that Kavanaugh has a curious habit of deferring to cases that happen to match his conservative beliefs, rather than the most current rulings. Convenient.
So, with that in mind—would he vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, or not? Judiciary Committee members tried, to no avail, to get a straight answer from him all week. Ten million times, Kavanaugh referred to Roe as “settled law”—though, characteristically, he would not say whether he believed it was correctly decided—and for some time, that chorus of “precedent on precedent” seemed, on its face, reassuring. But while Kavanaugh’s poker face never broke down, his show of sureness on the matter did. First, a leaked email from his time working in the White House seemed to indicate that Kavanaugh doesn’t really think Roe is all that airtight. Then, in what felt like perhaps the loudest indication of his own personal views from the entire proceedings, Kavanaugh referred to various kinds of contraception as “abortion-inducing drugs.” And perhaps that’s no big deal! Happens to all of us, right? We wake up, panicked, and we text our best friends, “Oh shit! Forgot to take my abortion last night!” Could be an honest mistake. Who knows.
Okay, so—what could this guy have possibly told Senator Susan Collins (R—Maine), a key vote in his confirmation and a firm advocate of choice, to reassure her that he won’t gut abortion rights? Hard to say. If you’re a Maine resident and want to talk it over with someone from her staff, call (202) 224-2523 and press 0 to be connected.
Does Kavanaugh really believe that a sitting president can’t be investigated or indicted? Kavanaugh went out of his way to say that “no one is above the law,” and reiterated over and over the importance of an “independent judiciary,” but he evaded all Trump-related questions under the guise of wanting to “stay three zip codes away” from political matters. Fine.
What should concern us here is the same thing that’s concerned us since it was announced that Kavanaugh would be the Supreme Court nominee: Despite what his pals and coworkers would have us believe, he’s not coming into this nomination with a reputation for measuredness. On this issue, he’s coming in as a potential presidential appointee, culled from a short list of options, and what seemed to set him apart from everyone else was his stated belief that presidents shouldn’t have their days interrupted by investigations. Kavanaugh had the opportunity this week to assuage the country’s collective raised eyebrow on that one by firmly asserting that he wouldn’t let presidential power go unchecked. He simply didn’t do it. He wouldn’t tell the committee whether he’d recuse himself in Trump-related matters.
Furthermore, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D—Rhode Island) pointed out, he may have chosen his words carefully to create an “escape hatch” that would allow him to spare President Trump from having to appear before a grand jury by differentiating those circumstances from ones that eventually led to President Richard Nixon handing over the infamous Watergate tapes. Clever.
How good of a friend would Kavanaugh be to the NRA? Uh, BFF-level, it seems. Claiming a blind loyalty to precedent once again, Kavanaugh more or less confirmed that he would be unlikely to vote for the regulation of semiautomatic weapons or the future regulation of 3-D printed weapons. He hinted at his personal ideas about how to deal with America’s mass-shooting crisis when he talked about his daughters’ (private) school: “They do a lot of things now that are different than they did just a few years ago in terms of trying to harden the school and make it safer for everyone.”
Wasn’t there something in the mix about him doing something sketchy with emails?Yes, though the implications are unclear. In the early 2000s, while he was working in the Bush administration, Kavanaugh was the recipient of some strategy intel on several Democratic congresspersons. As he testified this week, he didn’t know that the information had been stolen in a hack of the congresspersons’ emails. But Kavanaugh’s emails from back then—which leaked this week—make that theory seem kinda hard to believe. Much of the information that was passed on to Kavanaugh was still labeled “not for disclosure”—meaning that he wants us to believe he saw that and thought, “Well, shucks, I guess the Dems didn’t want anyone outside their office to see this except for me, a guy working in a Republican White House. Two points!” And, um, the subject heading of this one is literally “spying.” Anyway, seeing as double standards don’t exist, I’m sure we’ll be hearing cries of “But his emails!” any second now.
Lastly: Why was Kavanaugh taking notes with a Sharpie all week? Sir! What do you have against the other side of the paper?
Megan Angelo writes about TV and is the author of the novel Followers, which will be published in 2019.