Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Kavanaugh is an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, having been confirmed in October 2018 amidst significant controversy due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, D.C., Kavanaugh attended Yale College and Yale Law School, where he demonstrated academic excellence. His legal career includes prestigious clerkships and roles in high-stakes political investigations, notably as an associate independent counsel during the Whitewater investigation involving President Bill Clinton.
Kavanaugh served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit before his Supreme Court nomination by President Donald Trump, which sparked debates regarding his judicial temperament and judicial philosophy, particularly about executive power and abortion rights. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has aligned with the conservative majority on several significant rulings while also surprising some observers with decisions that favored voting rights. The allegations against him continue to be a contentious topic, reflecting deep societal divisions and political polarization in the U.S. Kavanaugh is married and has two daughters, and he actively participates in community and religious activities.
Brett Kavanaugh
US Supreme Court Justice
- Born: February 12, 1965
- Place of Birth: Washington, DC
Education: Yale College; Yale Law School
Significance: A staunch conservative with experience in many high-profile partisan political issues, including the Whitewater investigation, the Starr Report, and the Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election, Brett Kavanaugh became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court in October 2018. His confirmation was controversial due in part to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.
Background
Born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, DC, Brett Kavanaugh was the only child of Edward Kavanaugh and Martha Kavanaugh. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and attended Georgetown Preparatory School, where he was the captain of the basketball team. After his 1983 graduation, he studied at Yale College. He graduated cum laude in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree. He then attended Yale Law School, where he wrote for the Yale Law Journal and earned his juris doctorate in 1990.
Legal Career
After earning his law degree, Kavanaugh held three prestigious clerkships. From 1990 to 1991, he clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The following year, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then worked as an attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General from 1992 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
Between September 1994 and December 1998, Kavanaugh was an associate independent counsel under Independent Counsel Ken Starr during investigations of the Whitewater investment scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Kavanaugh persuaded Starr to allow him to investigate unsupported allegations that the death of Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent Foster, was a Whitewater-related murder—despite the fact that two prior investigations had ruled Foster’s death a suicide. In late 1997, Kavanaugh took a five-month absence from the Office of the Independent Counsel to join a DC law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, as a partner. He returned to the firm in 1999, where he specialized in commercial and constitutional litigation.
Kavanaugh left private practice in 2001 and joined President George W. Bush’s administration as an associate counsel to the president. In 2003, he was promoted to senior associate counsel. Later that year, he became an assistant and staff secretary to the president, a position he held through 2006.
Kavanaugh was twice nominated as a judge to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2003 and 2005, but no Senate vote was taken. On January 25, 2006, George W. Bush nominated him to fill Laurence H. Silberman’s seat. During confirmation hearings in 2004 and 2006, several senators opposed his confirmation. In 2004, Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, noted Kavanaugh had worked as a lawyer for far-right conservatives and asserted his nomination was “judicial payment for political services rendered” rather than being due to his qualifications. Questions also arose about Kavanaugh’s knowledge of the Bush administration’s torture policy and treatment of detainees, with Kavanaugh testifying under oath that he was not involved in the policy. These concerns reappeared during the 2006 confirmation hearings, but the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh on May 26, 2006. He served as a federal appellate judge for the District of Columbia circuit court from May 30, 2006, until October 5, 2018.
On July 10, 2018, President Donald J. Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court to fill retiring justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s seat. Kavanaugh’s nomination became controversial, with many citizens concerned that Kavanaugh was too extreme in his ideology to be apolitical and impartial. A key concern was his stance on executive power, as he believed a president should not be indicted while in office—a conclusion he came to after his involvement with the Whitewater investigation. Many also feared that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would give the court a long-term conservative majority that could lead to a repeal of abortion rights established by Roe v. Wade (1973).
Despite intense grilling by Democratic senators, who asserted Kavanaugh had not been truthful during his mid-2000s confirmation hearings, his confirmation seemed certain due to the Republican majority in the Senate. However, that certainty came into doubt in mid-September 2018 when Christine Blasey Ford, a Stanford psychology professor, came forward with a claim that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a Maryland house party when they both were teens. Other allegations of sexual misconduct on Kavanaugh’s part also surfaced.
Ford testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, and reported her recollections of the event. Kavanaugh denied Ford’s accusations, and in sworn testimony before the committee, he angrily accused the Democrats of orchestrating “a political hit” due to their loss in the 2016 presidential election. Trump ordered a limited investigation of Ford’s allegations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Democratic senators and others decried the limited scope of the investigation as being insufficient. After reviewing the FBI report, the Senate held its final vote and confirmed Kavanaugh by a historically close vote of 50–48, mostly along party lines. Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court on October 6, 2018.
In his first term on the high court, Kavanaugh proved himself, as expected, to be reliably conservative, although not without exception. On a number of occasions, he and Chief Justice John Roberts, a moderate conservative, sided with the court's more liberal justices, as in a ruling that went against tech giant Apple in allowing an antitrust lawsuit to proceed. However, Kavanaugh voted with the conservative majority on some signature conservative issues, such as immigrant detention, the death penalty, and sovereign immunity. He also pleased conservatives by joining a key ruling that federal courts do not have the power to review partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts by states.
The sexual misconduct allegations aired in Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation fight did not fade quickly. One year after his confirmation, two New York Times reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, published The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, a book that explores fresh allegations regarding his conduct as a Yale undergraduate and incited calls from some Democrats for Kavanaugh to be impeached. As if to underscore the continuing divisions in the country, two conservative writers, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, had months earlier published an impassioned defense of Kavanaugh, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, which became a bestseller.
While Justice Neil Gorsuch, another more conservative member of the court who had been nominated and confirmed in 2017, wrote the majority opinion in a 2020 case pertaining to LGBTQ rights that ruled that LGBTQ workers are protected from discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kavanaugh was one of three justices who dissented. In a separate dissent, he acknowledged the significance of the ruling for the LGBTQ community but argued that Title VII did not explicitly include protection against sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination in employment. That same year, he dissented in a ruling that struck down a Louisiana anti-abortion law but joined the majority opinion in a presidential power case that ruled that Trump, as president, did not possess a general right to withhold his financial records.
In June 2022, Kavanaugh voted with the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to decide that abortion was not a constitutional right, thus overturning the previous precedent set by Roe v. Wade in 1973. (Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization centered on a Mississippi law that banned abortions after fifteen weeks, which the Supreme Court also voted to uphold.) Kavanaugh was then the target of an assassination plot later that same month that stemmed from his support of both the Dobbs decision and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, a 2022 decision that greatly expanded the Second Amendment by deciding that carrying a pistol in public was a constitutional right. (The case challenged a New York state law that required prospective concealed carry applicants to prove they met special conditions for gun ownership that separated them from an average citizen, which the Supreme Court eventually determined to be unconstitutional.) The attempt was foiled when the alleged suspect turned himself in to the police after driving to Kavanaugh's home with a loaded pistol.
During the Supreme Court's October 2022 to October 2023 term, Kavanaugh concurred with the court's conservatives on rulings that prohibited affirmative action in college admissions, allowed a wedding vendor to refuse services to same-sex couples, and struck down President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. Kavanaugh also concurred with the court's center-right chief justice John Roberts and three liberal justices on Moore v. Harper (2023), which ruled that the Elections Clause of the Constitution does not give states full control over federal elections without state or federal review, thus rejecting the independent state legislature theory under which state lawmakers would have had nearly total power over federal elections. Kavanaugh and the same four justices also voted in Allen v. Milligan that a congressional map drawn up by Alabama's predominantly Republican state legislature had the effect of diluting the votes of Black Alabamans in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Some observers viewed Kavanaugh and Roberts's votes to support the VRA as surprising given their votes on earlier Supreme Court decisions involving the VRA.
In 2023, Justice, a documentary on Ford and other women's sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh in 2018 and the FBI's subsequent investigation, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The director of the film, Doug Liman, stated that the documentary focused on the shortcomings of the investigation, judicial process, government institutions, and bureaucracy and their impact on the nation. In 2024, Ford published her memoir, One Way Back, in which she related her recollections of assault, which Kavanaugh denied.
The issue of sexual misconduct continued to dog Kavanaugh. In 2021, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island led a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh after Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court. The subcommittee released its report in October 2024. It found that tips called in to the FBI tip line were forwarded directly to the White House without investigation. The FBI responded with a statement that the agency's background investigations are limited to what has been requested. Whitehouse, a Democrat, said the FBI should work with the Senate and White House to ensure future investigations were permitted to follow up on allegations and interview people making them.
Impact
The controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court reflected deep political and social divisions in American society. Opponents of Kavanaugh’s confirmation considered his angry testimony in front of the judicial committee proof that he lacked the temperament to be a Supreme Court justice. They asserted that Republicans allowed their political goals to overrule credible and serious allegations against Kavanaugh. Proponents of his confirmation believed that Democrats were using unsubstantiated allegations to try to keep a well-qualified judge from sitting on the nation’s highest court.
Kavanaugh’s successful confirmation gave the Supreme Court its first solid conservative majority in decades, promising to shape US law for years to come. His appointment also roused the liberal opposition. For example, within days of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, activists raised more than $3.5 million to support the 2020 campaign of an unknown Democratic opponent to Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Maine Republican who cast one of the determining votes in Kavanaugh’s favor.
Personal Life
Kavanaugh married Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, a personal secretary to President George W. Bush, in 2004. They had two daughters, Margaret and Liza. Kavanaugh is a practicing Catholic, community volunteer, and Catholic Youth Organization basketball coach.
Bibliography
Berenson, Tessa. "Inside Brett Kavanaugh's First Term on the Supreme Court." Time, 28 July 2019, time.com/longform/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-first-term/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Bresnahan, John, and Burgess Everett. “Kavanaugh Wins Confirmation to the Supreme Court.” Politico, 6 Oct. 2018, www.politico.com/story/2018/10/06/kavanaugh-confirmation-vote-877357. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
“Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to Be Circuit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit: Second Session, April 27, 2004.” US Government Printing Office, 2005, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-108shrg24853/pdf/CHRG-108shrg24853.pdf. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Cranley, Ellen, and Michelle Mark. “Here Are All the Sexual-Misconduct Allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.” Business Insider, 27 Sept. 2018, www.businessinsider.com/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-misconduct-allegations-2018-9. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Hemingway, Mollie, and Carrie Severino. Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. Regnery Publishing, 2019.
“Kavanaugh Hearing: Transcript.” The Washington Post, 27 Sept. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-hearing-transcript/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Kirchgaessner, Stephanie. "Trump Administration Protected Brett Kavanaugh from Full FBI Investigation." The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2024, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/08/trump-brett-kavanaugh-investigation-fbi. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Lee, Benjamin. "'I Hope This Triggers Outrage': Surprise Brett Kavanaugh Documentary Premieres at Sundance." The Guardian, 21 Jan. 2023, www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/21/brett-kavanaugh-documentary-sundance-film-festival. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Lipak, Adam. "Supreme Court Rejects Theory That Would Have Transformed American Elections." The New York Times, 27 June 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court-state-legislature-elections.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Stern, Mark Joseph. "John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh Really Did Just Save the Voting Rights Act." Slate, 8 June 2023, slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-save-voting-rights-act.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Pogrebin, Robin, and Kate Kelly. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. Portfolio, 2019.
“The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh: Signed 2,400+ Law Professors.” The New York Times, 3 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/opinion/kavanaugh-law-professors-letter.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.
Williams, Pete. "Two Supreme Court Jaw Droppers: The LGBTQ Decision and You Can't Believe Who Wrote It." NBC News, 15 June 2020, www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/two-supreme-court-jaw-droppers-lgbtq-decision-you-can-t-n1231120. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.