Featured

The Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative political campaign organization, has put out a $1.4 million ad to promote and secure the confirmation of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court after the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. In the past few days, the ads appeared in at least four states and to the national audience.

In a CBS News interview, Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network said Kavanaugh is a “rockstar” of the federal courts.

On Twitter, Severino said:

“Brett Kavanaugh is a home run. Like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh is brilliant, fair and independent, committed to following the law and honoring the Constitution. I look forward to the confirmation of another great justice.”

As an author of nearly 300 opinions during his 12 years on the federal bench, Severino said during the interview that Kavanaugh is “known on the D.C. Circuit as someone who has a real expertise in the important questions of the constitutional limits on government, the separation of powers, and major administrative law issues that come before that court, specifically.”

She went on to say that the judge has taught as Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown law schools, leading him to be nationally-recognized, even insofar as the “Supreme Court is often adopting his opinion in at least 11 different opinions,” Severino said.

The states in which the ad was most-heavily placed were Alabama, Indiana, West Virginia, and North Dakota, all of which are states that President Donald Trump carried in 2016 that currently have a Democratic senator running for re-election. Regardless, of the validity of the ad, and whether one likes Kavanaugh or not, something like this has never happened before – there has never been an ad promoting a Supreme Court justice as a political issue.

The judicial branch of the government, explicitly, must remain apolitical. Everyone understands that a judge has his or her political biases, but rule in cases on an apolitical stance, forwarding the principles of the Constitution, only.

Democrats, rather, progressives, are bloviating that the confirmation of Kavanaugh will usher in the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, ending life on Earth as we know it. None other than the most volatile expression which makes the sentiment up is the belief that Kavanaugh will overturn the landmark case Roe v. Wade (1972), wherein a woman’s right to an abortion was read out of the privacy clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Kavanaugh, however, has stated that he will uphold the notion of stare decisis, respecting the decisions of his predecessors.

As well, the “political lean” of the Court does not really alter with the addition of Kavanaugh. Now that Kennedy has stepped down, Chief Justice John Roberts may have to take a influential role in being the designated “swing voter,” as Kavanaugh is more conservative than Roberts, but nothing changes.

Most constitutional scholars would even say that keeping a fairly balanced court – 5-4 either way – is the best thing to do when replacing a justice.

Still, the fact that a political ad was sent out to pressure politically vulnerable senators to confirm Kavanaugh, most of whom already will vote for him, may lead to setting a dangerous precedent in mixing political campaign issues with the apolitical nature of the Supreme Court. Many thought the highest court in the land was still the island of purity in a quagmire of political muck; but it seems that it too is being pulled closer towards the shores of the briney, breaucratic deep.