Sam Stroud
Staff Writer
The battle to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy began on Tuesday as the Senate kicked off the confirmation hearing for president Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
In the months after Kennedy announced his time on the Supreme Court would be ending prematurely, Democrats have acted like petulant children who dropped their ice cream on the sidewalk and are making any arguments they can to block Kavanaugh.
The problem is that they have no logical argument to stop his confirmation.
Politically, Kavanaugh is as experienced as they come, with over a decade spent on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He has ruled on hundreds of cases, with some of his opinions being cited in major Supreme Court cases, such as Zubik v. Burwell, in which Kavanaugh wrote that the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s requirement that Catholic religious organizations provide free contraceptives violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The Supreme Court cited his writing in overruling the federal court that required religious organizations to adhere to the ACA requirement.
There’s nothing to discredit Kavanaugh in his personal life, either. He’s a practicing Catholic with a wife and two daughters. He has volunteered in soup kitchens and coached girls’ basketball. Kavanaugh has no major scandals surrounding him. This is not exactly the profile of a raging misogynist who wants to send back women’s rights a hundred years, as Cecile Richards, who claimed his nomination is a “scary time for women,” would have you believe.
Those are the only two factors that really should matter in a Supreme Court nominee — do they have mental capacity and experience to handle the job, and do they have the integrity and character to fit the role? Judge Kavanaugh fits those criteria.
Just because Kavanaugh is right of center doesn’t make him unfit for the bench.
There are four leftist justices on the Supreme Court, and that’s not some happy accident. Democratic presidents nominate left-of-center candidates, just as Republican presidents nominate right-of-center candidates. This is a trend that has gone on for decades and will continue for decades.
Democrats have resorted to desperate proclamations of the end of the American Republic. Nearly all of them have backed the stance of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that they will oppose Kavanaugh.
Democratic senator Kamala Harris from California claimed in an interview that the country was looking at “the destruction of the Constitution.”
A former Democratic governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, tweeted “the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh will threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come and will morph our Supreme Court into a political arm of the right-wing Republican Party.”
Most Democrats seem to agree that Kavanaugh is a threat to the country; the only disagreement between themselves is how high the body count will be if he makes it to the Supreme Court.
Judge Kavanaugh has all the qualities you could want in a justice. He is a skilled writer, a loving father and an intelligent deliberator. There is a reason the American Bar Association unanimously called Kavanaugh “well qualified” to sit on the Supreme Court. It’s not because he’s a fascist who is about to rip up the Constitution and turn America into a totalitarian state.
A nominee’s personal politics, contrary to what the left declares, does not and should not matter. Having a strict interpretation of the Constitution is not a valid reason to be held from the Supreme Court.
