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Brett Kavanaugh, Russian asset Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, has been publicly auditioning for the job for years, taking every opportunity to appear as if he's a moderate living in the 21st century. But it's his writings that show his true colors.
For example, this anecdote related in a Washington Post story, when he spoke to Yale's, his alma mater, Black Law Students Association about how he was "concerned that African Americans and other minorities were being shut out of coveted clerkships with federal judges like him" and then gave his email and phone number out, encouraging the students to apply. He did hire two African American Yalies for clerks at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. One of his former clerks says "It was important to him that everyone have access."
Which looks really great on camera when related to the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee in confirmation hearings. What doesn't look so great is all the stuff Kavanaugh has done over the years as a judge, things like uphold South Carolina's voter suppression efforts. Or things that he wrote previously, like a 1999 case when he was in private practice and called a government program for Native Hawaiians a "naked racial-spoils system." Writing about that case in a newspaper column, Kavanaugh invoked Antonin Scalia on a case in racial preferences in hiring: "Under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. . . . In the eyes of government, we are just one race here."
"That kind of statement," says Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, "really signals that he will bring an anti-civil-rights agenda to the Supreme Court and fails to recognize the current reality of being a person of color in this country and the history of discrimination." Giving talks to black law students and hiring people of color as clerks isn't indicative of "Kavanaugh's worldview" she notes, not given that he's spoken to the right-wing Federalist Society dozens of times.
Kavanaugh would tip the court on civil rights, on affirmative action, on voting rights as well as on abortion and healthcare. He's up for that pivotal seat, held by Anthony Kennedy, that has tended to swing in favor of a more just society. "He's not someone for whom you have to guess about," said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.