There’s a strange dimension to the Republican campaign to push through Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, on top of a credible accusation of sexual assault from his days in high school, which Kavanaugh denies. It’s their insistence that he is “one of the most qualified Supreme Court nominees to come before the Senate,” as Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley put it. “His credentials are well known.”
But what are these qualifications and credentials? An honest look at his career shows that it’s extraordinarily undistinguished.
Born into a privileged family that was well-connected in Republican Party politics, Kavanaugh coasted from Georgetown Prep, where he was apparently a hard partier, into Yale, where he joined the notoriously hard-partying secret society Truth & Courage, and then on to Yale Law School.
Soon after graduating, he got a gig working for independent counsel Ken Starr — a plum position for a Republican lawyer on the make because the Starr inquiry was supposed to take down the Clinton administration. Instead, it ended up an ignominious, embarrassing failure, generating an impeachment process that was so spectacularly misguided and unpopular that Democrats pulled off the nearly impossible feat of gaining seats during a midterm election when they controlled the White House.
Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski, an appeals court judge who was well known to the lay public for his witty opinions and well known to the legal community as a sexual harasser. When the sexual harassment became a matter of public embarrassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Kavanaugh professed to have simply not noticed anything amiss — including somehow not remembering Kozinski’s dirty jokes email distribution list.
Despite this inattention to detail, Kavanaugh ended up in the George W. Bush White House, playing a critical behind-the-scenes role as staff secretary to an administration that suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, let the perpetrator get away, invaded Iraq to halt the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and destroyed the global economy.
Kavanaugh then landed a seat on the DC Circuit Court, though to do so, he had to offer testimony that we now know to have been misleading regarding his role in both William Pryor’s nomination for a different federal judgeship and the handling of some emails stolen from Democratic Party committee staff. On the DC Circuit, he issued some normal GOP party-line rulings befitting his career as a Republican Party foot soldier.
Now he may end up as a Supreme Court justice despite never in his life having been involved in anything that was actually successful. He has never meaningfully taken responsibility for the substantive failures of the Starr inquiry or the Bush White House, where his tenure as a senior staffer coincided with both Hurricane Katrina and failed Social Security privatization plan as well as the email shenanigans he misled Congress about, or for his personal failure as a bystander to Kozinski’s abuses.
He’s been a man on the make ever since his teen years, and has consistently acted with the breezy confidence of privilege. As he told Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” though the line was mysteriously omitted from the written transcript of the speech given to Congress.
