Brett Kavanaugh picked the wrong holiday party.
The Supreme Court justice, who has been much maligned since his bruising 2018 confirmation process, made headlines again this week when he was seen at a private party at the residence of Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, which was attended by other conservative figures.
In response to the online reactions and media reports that Kavanaugh’s sighting “raises ethics questions,” Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino, a conservative lawyer, likened keeping tabs on Kavanaugh and other party attendees to the “Christmas party patrol.”
“The Left doesn’t like that a majority of the court cares more about following the law than the desires of the New York Times editorial board, so they are resorting to making up fake ethical standards, like the Christmas party patrol, that they conveniently apply only to certain justices,” Severino told the Washington Examiner.
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Kavanaugh’s appearance at the private event was reported in Politico’s “Playbook,“ which noted other attendees, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), former President Donald Trump‘s White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and conservative political commentator Sebastian Gorka, among other right-wing figures. Stephen Miller, whose group, America First Legal Foundation, has interests in cases pending before the high court, was also in attendance, according to Bloomberg Law.
Although high court justices aren’t bound by the judicial code of ethics for federal judges, the private event, which took place at Schlapp’s Alexandria, Virginia, home, struck a chord with an array of legal experts who opined on the private holiday gathering but stopped short of calling Kavanaugh’s appearance a violation of any ethics standards.
Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Entin suggested that while justices shouldn’t be “cloistered” from the public, they can’t shield themselves from how some critics might see their social interactions.
“At a time when many people regard Supreme Court justices as politicians in robes, why do things that reinforce those suspicions?” Entin told the Washington Examiner. Still, he contended, “this is not the biggest deal in the world, it just looks bad to me.”
The event took place just days after the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee held a hearing, with some members promoting passage of a bill to employ stricter ethics codes for high court justices in response to a whistleblower who alleged he operated a yearslong campaign to influence high court justices on matters such as abortion.
But Entin made clear that his point “goes beyond attending parties,” saying he believes the “bad look” stems from attending the party hosted by the head of an influential PAC. It is “entirely apart from whether any of the other guests might have business before the Supreme Court now or in the future,” he said.
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“Of course, justices and judges are entitled to have social lives, but they should pay attention to appearances,” Entin said. “And socializing with people who have leading roles in ideological organizations gives credence to suspicions that these jurists have preconceived notions of how to decide cases.”
Both Entin and Tonja Jacobi, a professor at Emory University School of Law who spoke to Bloomberg Law, agreed that the calls for stricter judgment in the justices’ social interactions should apply equally to Republican- and Democratic-appointed justices.
Entin referred to the liberal American Constitution Society that hosted Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, as a guest speaker in June. And Justice Elena Kagan is well documented for having a somewhat buzzing social life outside the court, with “dinner parties and meals out with friends, many of them lawyers, judges, and journalists,” according to the New Yorker.
The House committee’s hearing with whistleblower Rev. Rob Schenck, a former anti-abortion activist, surrounded his allegations that Justice Samuel Alito had leaked the outcome of a 2014 high court opinion a couple of weeks before it released, claims that the justice has denied with support from the Supreme Court’s general counsel.
But Entin said his “takeaway” from the hearing was not Schenck’s claims about Alito; rather, it was the former activist’s prior attempts to unite influential conservative couples with Republican-appointed justices in an effort to “bolster” their views on matters related to anti-abortion causes.
“That’s a problem, whether or not Justice Alito prematurely revealed the decision in that case. But now that we know that one outfit made the effort to cultivate justices, all of the justices should be sensitive to such efforts and to appearances,” Entin said.
Nominated by Trump in 2018 to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh was lambasted by Democratic lawmakers and the media during his confirmation hearings over Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her decades before when they were in high school. Kavanaugh, who was previously a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, vehemently denied those allegations in public hearings and was confirmed by a narrow 51-49 vote in the Senate.
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The Washington Examiner contacted CPAC for a response.
