The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is proving a hard thing for liberals and progressives to counter. The man’s qualifications are nearly unparalleled; he is highly regarded by judges and law professors at elite institutions; and so far the efforts to find unflattering particulars about his past have come to nothing. We knew things were going to be tough for Kavanaugh’s adversaries when, a few days after his nomination, the Washington Post reported that he had racked up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt in order to buy . . . tickets to Washington Nationals baseball games for himself and his friends. So on top of everything else, he’s a normal dude.
The credit cards, incidentally, are now fully paid off. Moreover, Kavanaugh has reported only a small amount of income from sources other than his salary—less than $30,000, far below the hundreds of thousands and even millions customary for other high-level judges.
We were prepared, even so, for the onslaught of tendentious allegations and harebrained criticisms the nomination of conservative judges always seems to occasion these days. Among the best so far: an opinion piece on the left-leaning Vox.com by Penn State law professor Eleanor Marie Lawrence Brown. The piece’s logorrheic headline tells you most of what you need to know: “Elite law professors are brushing politics aside to support fellow elite Brett Kavanaugh. That’s inexcusable in the Trump era.”
Brown, a former D.C. Circuit law clerk, concedes that she has “heard nothing but praise about [Kavanaugh] from my many friends who know him. He is, by all accounts, an extraordinary public servant and a kind and generous person.” Yet she’s worried that Kavanaugh’s fellow elites, including two liberal Ivy League academics, have praised him in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Why the worry? Because, writes Brown, a Jamaican national, elites praise other elites in Third World countries, too.
So the fact that elites are praising Kavanaugh is the problem, since that’s what happens in the patronage-based politics of Jamaica. No doubt if Ivy-educated elites were condemning Kavanaugh, that would raise a different set of worries in the minds of Brown and her concerned fellow professors
