The Kavanaugh Rehabilitation Tour Continues With A Dumbfounded Anthony Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh spoke before a friendly audience, without screaming or crying this time.

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(Photo By Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women and has had 83 ethics complaints filed against him, spoke in public for the first time since his confirmation hearings last summer. He, and retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, spoke at a Seventh Circuit judicial conference in a question-and-answer format moderated by Chief Judge Diane Wood.

He shared some of his thoughts on technology and the Constitution, which I guess we have to pay attention to since he will wield power for decades absent Congressional resolve to investigate the many allegations of misconduct and perjury leveled against him. From the Wall Street Journal:

“I see technology straining our traditional understandings of speech, of privacy and of war in a way that’s going to be a huge challenge for our system of separation of powers, and a huge challenge for all of us as judges and as citizens,“ he told a judicial conference here Monday night.

It creeps me out when a man, whose main defense against allegations of attempted rape was to pull out a handwritten calendar he allegedly made as a teenager, worries that “technology” is a challenge to free speech. It’s always seemed to me that technology democratizes speech and puts it in the hands of everybody, not just prep school boys who can marshal ruling elites to do the talking for them. Technology levels the speech advantage people like Kavanaugh have had their entire lives. I am unimpressed by the privacy concerns of men in public office who would rather women keep their stories to themselves.

Kavanaugh also worried that the reality of cyber war threatened the separation of powers, allowing presidents to amass significant forces for undeclared “wars” waged online, without the approval of Congress. It’s an important Constitutional concern, but given Kavanaugh’s track record of believing the president contains enough executive authority unto himself to make the Sun King blush, I doubt Kavanaugh is on the Constitutional side of the issue.

While Chief Judge Wood didn’t refer to him as “Justice Alleged Attempted Rapist,” as I would have, she did dangle a toe into some political waters, prompting Justice Brett to give a word-salad answer:

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Diane Wood, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a Clinton appointee who was on President Obama’s short list for the Supreme Court, asked if there are “Bush judges or Obama judges or Trump judges or Clinton judges,” as President Trump has said, or whether federal judges strive to discharge their duties without regard to political patronage, as Chief Justice John Roberts said in response to the president.

Seconding his retired mentor, Justice Kavanaugh responded as if it were obvious that judges must act independently. Like Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a work he often cites as deeply influential, he said he strove “to stand in the other person’s shoes,” and that he repeatedly asked himself to justify why he had reached a particular outcome.

“If you do all that, you help to live up to the standard independence that our framers set,” he said.

Brett Kavanaugh’s professional career was nurtured in bowels of Republican legal hackery. At no point in his professional record do we see anything other than a purely partisan stooge. When Kavanaugh (misquotes) the Mockingbird line that you don’t understand a person “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” he’s probably thinking of it in the Buffalo Bill way, and not as Atticus Finch intended.

And yet the most infuriating line of the night was brought to us by the man most directly responsible for infecting Kavanaugh upon our polity, Anthony Kennedy:

Particularly since his retirement last July, Justice Kennedy, 82 years old, has publicly lamented what he sees as declining civility in American public discourse.

“What do you see as the source of what’s currently plaguing our society” in that regard, “and what do you see as the solution?” asked U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman, an Obama appointee who clerked for Justice Kennedy alongside Justice Kavanaugh.

“I don’t know, Gary,” Justice Kennedy said. He added: “We’re still too overconfident that democracy can survive without conscious effort. But that’s not true.”

You don’t know? You don’t KNOW why public discourse in this country lacks civility? You think it’s US, people who are not you, who are “overconfident” that democracy can survive without effort? HAVE YOU LOOKED TO YOUR OWN SELF AND CONSIDERED YOUR ROLE IN THIS TRAVESTY!!??

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I have literally no patience for a man who handed a Supreme Court seat to the most uncivilized raging asshole ever to speak as President of the United States, who then laments the state of our civic discourse. I have NO patience for a man whose handpicked successor screamed and snarked his way through his confirmation hearings, all but threatening revenge upon his Democratic enemies once imbued with unaccountable power. And I barely have respect for a man who had a chance to single-handedly walk back some of the partisan rancor in the country by ordering political districts to be drawn with the aid of MATH instead of politics, but punted that chance away because he was too much of a coward to pick a side.

Anthony Kennedy can eat a bag of dicks for all I care about his newfound “concern” for civility.

What Kennedy and Kavanaugh have conspired to do to the Supreme Court is tragic. I’ll never forget and I’ll never let anybody else forget, right up until the moment Justice Kavanaugh comes for my “technology” and determines that the First Amendment no longer applies to people who remember what kind of person he is.

Kavanaugh Warns Technology Will Force Re-Examination of Rights, War Powers [Wall Street Journal]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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