Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Michael Kavanaugh is an American lawyer and jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, and has served since October 6, 2018. He was previously a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2006 to 2018.
Kavanaugh studied history at Yale University, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He then attended Yale Law School, after which he began his career as a law clerk working under Judge Ken Starr. After Starr left the D.C. Circuit to become the head of the Office of Independent Counsel, Kavanaugh assisted him with investigations concerning President Bill Clinton, including drafting the Starr Report recommending Clinton's impeachment. He joined the Bush administration as White House staff secretary and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees. Bush nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2003. His confirmation hearings were contentious and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit in May 2006.
President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on July 9, 2018, to fill the position vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Before his U.S. Senate confirmation proceedings began, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s. Three other women also accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one of whom later recanted her story. None of the accusations were corroborated by eyewitness testimony, and Kavanaugh denied them. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a supplemental hearing over the allegations and voted 11–10 along party lines to advance the confirmation to a full Senate vote. On October 6, the full Senate confirmed Kavanaugh by a vote of 50–48.
Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, Kavanaugh has come to be regarded as a swing vote on the Court. He was the target of an assassination plot in June 2022; the suspect had hoped to disrupt the rulings in Dobbs and Bruen.
Early life and education
Kavanaugh was born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, D.C., the son of Martha Gamble and Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr. He is of Irish Catholic descent on both sides of his family. His paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Roscommon, Ireland, in the late 19th century, and his maternal Irish lineage goes back to his great-great-grandparents settling in New Jersey. Kavanaugh's father was a lawyer and served as the president of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association for two decades. His mother was a history teacher at Woodson and McKinley high schools in Washington in the 1960s and 1970s. She earned a Juris Doctor degree from American University in 1978 and served from 1995 to 2001 as a Maryland Circuit Court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland.Kavanaugh was raised in Bethesda, Maryland. As a teenager, he attended Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit boys' college prep school, where he was two years ahead of Neil Gorsuch, with whom he later clerked at the Supreme Court and alongside whom he later served as a Supreme Court justice. He was captain of the school's basketball team and was a wide receiver and cornerback on the football team. Kavanaugh was also friends with classmate Mark Judge; both were in the same class with Maryland state senator Richard Madaleno.
After graduating from Georgetown Prep in 1983, Kavanaugh went to Yale University, as had his paternal grandfather. Several of Kavanaugh's Yale classmates remembered him as a "serious but not showy student" who loved sports, especially basketball. He unsuccessfully tried out for the Yale Bulldogs men's basketball team and later played for two years on the junior varsity team. He wrote articles about basketball and other sports for the Yale Daily News, and was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon. He graduated from Yale in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in history.
Kavanaugh then attended Yale Law School, where he lived in a group house with future judge James E. Boasberg and played basketball with professor George L. Priest, the sponsor of the school's Federalist Society. He was a member of the Yale Law Journal and served as a notes editor during his third year. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale Law with a Juris Doctor degree in 1990.
Legal career (1990–2006)
Clerkships
Kavanaugh served as a law clerk for Judge Walter King Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1990 to 1991. During his clerkship, Stapleton wrote the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Third Circuit upheld many of Pennsylvania's abortion restrictions. Kavanaugh then clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1991 to 1992. Yale Law professor George Priest recommended Kavanaugh to Kozinski, who was regarded as a feeder judge. Kavanaugh interviewed for a clerkship with Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1992 term, but was not offered a clerkship.After working as a summer associate for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, Kavanaugh earned a one-year fellowship with the Solicitor General of the United States, Ken Starr, from 1992 to 1993. He then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy from 1993 to 1994, alongside Neil Gorsuch and with future federal judge Gary Feinerman.
Ken Starr associate counsel
After his Supreme Court clerkship, Kavanaugh again worked for Ken Starr until 1997 as an Associate Counsel in the Office of the Independent Counsel with colleagues Rod Rosenstein and Alex Azar. In that capacity, he reopened an investigation into the 1993 gunshot death of Vincent Foster. After three years, the investigation concluded that Foster had committed suicide. In a September 2018 New York Times op-ed, Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz criticized Kavanaugh for having invested federal money and other resources into investigating partisan conspiracy theories surrounding the cause of Foster's death.After working in private practice in 1997–98, Kavanaugh rejoined Starr as an Associate Counselor in 1998. In Swidler & Berlin v. United States, Kavanaugh argued his first and only case before the Supreme Court. Arguing for Starr's office, Kavanaugh asked the Court to disregard attorney–client privilege in relation to the investigation of Foster's death. The court rejected Kavanaugh's arguments by a vote of 6–3.
Kavanaugh was a principal author of the Starr Report, released in September 1998, on the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky sex scandal; the report argued on broad grounds for Clinton's impeachment. Kavanaugh had urged Starr to ask Clinton sexually graphic questions, and described Clinton as being involved in "a conspiracy to obstruct justice", having "disgraced his office" and "lied to the American people". The report provided extensive and explicit descriptions of each of Clinton's sexual encounters with Lewinsky, a level of detail the authors called "essential" to the case against Clinton.
File:Bush, Card, Kavanaugh, and Rice.jpg|thumb|Kavanaugh with President Bush, Andy Card, and Condoleezza Rice
In December 2000, Kavanaugh joined the legal team of George W. Bush, which was trying to stop the ballot recount in Florida. After Bush became president in January 2001, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales hired Kavanaugh as an associate. There, Kavanaugh worked on the Enron scandal, the successful nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts, and the unsuccessful nomination of Miguel Estrada to the Court of Appeals. Starting in July 2003, he served as Assistant to the President and White House staff secretary, succeeding Harriet Miers. As the staff secretary, Kavanaugh was involved in the president's speechwriting process, helped put together legislation, and worked on drafting and revising executive orders. He was also responsible for coordinating all documents going to and from the president.
Private practice
From 1997 to 1998, Kavanaugh was an associate at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Kavanaugh rejoined Kirkland & Ellis in 1999 and eventually became a partner. While there in 2000, he was pro bono counsel of record for relatives of Elián González, a six-year-old rescued Cuban boy. After the boy's mother's death at sea, his relatives in the U.S. wanted to keep him from returning to the care of his sole surviving parent, his father in Cuba. Kavanaugh was among a series of lawyers who unsuccessfully sought to stop efforts to repatriate González to Cuba. The district court, Circuit Court and Supreme Court all followed precedent, refusing to block the repatriation.Also at Kirkland & Ellis, Kavanaugh authored two amicus briefs to the Supreme Court that supported religious activities and expressions in public places. The first, in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, argued that a student speaker at football games voted for by a majority of students should be treated as private speech in a limited public forum; the second, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, argued that a Christian Bible instruction program should have the same after-school access to school facilities as other non-curriculum-related student groups.
Federalist Society
Kavanaugh has been a member of the Federalist Society since 1988. In the administration of George W. Bush, he held a key position that involved judicial appointments. Bush judicial nominees who were Federalist Society members included John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both appointed to the Supreme Court, and about half the judges appointed to the courts of appeals.U.S. circuit judge (2006–2018)
President George W. Bush nominated Kavanaugh to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on July 25, 2003, but his nomination stalled in the Senate for nearly three years. Democratic senators accused him of being too partisan, with Senator Dick Durbin calling him the "Forrest Gump of Republican politics". In 2003, the American Bar Association had rated Kavanaugh "well qualified", but after doing dozens more interviews in 2006, downgraded him to "qualified".The Senate Judiciary Committee recommended he be confirmed on a 10–8 party-line vote on May 11, 2006, and he was confirmed by the Senate on May 26 by a vote of 57–36. Kavanaugh was sworn in on June 1. He was the fourth judge nominated to the D.C. Circuit by Bush and confirmed. Kavanaugh began hearing cases on September 11 and had his formal investiture on September 27.
In July 2007, senators Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin accused Kavanaugh of lying to the Judiciary Committee when he denied being involved in formulating the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies. In 2002, Kavanaugh had told other White House lawyers that he believed Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy would not approve of denying legal counsel to prisoners detained as enemy combatants. The issue reemerged in July 2018 after Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.