Brett Kavanaugh's role in policies to politicize the judiciary should disqualify him

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Today, with the limited number of Justice Kavanaugh's White House records that were shared with the Judiciary Committee, we were able to learn for the first time some information about his knowledge of this robbery.

This knowledge led Leahy to argue that Kavanaugh had misled the Senate in his first hearings for the DC Circuit Court by downplaying or even denying his involvement in the Bush-era controversies. Kavanaugh's machinations, with the fact that he and Miranda were interested in an investigation report from The nation on the extreme politicization of nomination and confirmation processes by Rove.

Among the small batch of emails now published that Miranda sent to Kavanaugh was one – addressed to "Brett" and signed "Manny" –who concluded: "On a related note, the Owen-Rove Nation article is being distributed by Leahy's staff." Marked "highly confidential," the email was dated July 18, 2002. It was two weeks after writing a Nation The article entitled: "The legal tricks of Karl Rove: Embark the judiciary with right-wing supporters like Priscilla Owen".

The article looked at a particularly dubious aspect of the judicial selection process that Kavanaugh needed to know and – if the pictures of him kissing Rove at that time are an indication – does not seem to have rejected. This is an indication of how far Bush's political henchmen have abandoned any sense of duty to the Constitution and the rule of law in order to score partisanship.

In the early years of Bush's presidency, I was very attentive to Rove's efforts to permeate the process of selecting politics. I had written a book on the Bush v. Gore Florida recount battle, which considered the intervention of a Republican-aligned majority on the US Supreme Court to stop an essential review of the disputed ballots. As such, I was particularly interested in promoting lawyers associated with Bush's main political attaché. I have spent a lot of time researching and writing about the appointment of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The article on "Karl Rove's Legal Ruses" described how the man described as "Bush's brain" turned Owen's passage to corporate law into conservative judicial activism.

He opened by recalling that President Alberto's internal lawyer at the time, Alberto R. Gonzales, had run into Owen when they both served in the Texas High Court. Gonzales complained at one point that Owen was proposing "an act of inadmissible judicial activism" to prevent a young woman from having an abortion. With that in mind, I noted that "when the Judiciary Committee of the Senate prepares for a hearing on the appointment of Owen as the second-ranking federal judge, White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales found in an uncomfortable position. have to sing the praises of a woman that he knows through his personal experience to be a radical right.

The article continued:

How was Gonzales, who headed the Bush administration's White House Assembly Judiciary Appointment Board, recruited by the Court of Appeal for a candidate he marked as extremism just two years ago? It's easy. Gonzales is not responsible for this one. "Owen," says Craig McDonald, director of the non-partisan Texans for Public Justice group, "is a Karl Rove special."

Rove, the Svengali politician who ran George W. Bush's presidential campaign and turned him into a financial adviser to the White House, orchestrated Owen's rapid rise since he snatched it from a Pipe concert Line and other energy companies to make it a judicial candidate. In 1994, the man that Lone Star's leaders still call "Bush's brains" wanted to make the high court of the state politically friendly to the man he was about to govern. Owen seemed appropriately flexible, and with Rove guiding his campaign, the political stranger who, in his sixteen years as a business lawyer, was the only counsel on four judged cases, was suddenly a Supreme Court of Canada court. Texas. Now, Rove is determined to place his protégé on one of the most influential calling benches in the country. This confirmation crusade does not concern Owen, who has never been a political pawn for the country's leading operator. There is no mention of Rove's desire to avenge the rejection by the Judicial Committee of the Senate of the appointment of Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering to the fifth circuit. On the contrary, Rove is working to win to confirm Owen in order to send a strong signal to the conservatives of the movement as to the determination of this administration to bring the courts together with legal activists ready to challenge the anti-discrimination laws, to thwart the protections workers and consumers. and above all, build a judicial infrastructure that will eventually cancel abortion rights. "Clearly," says McDonald, "Rove has chosen it as a favor for the right wing because she is the darling of the right wing."

Can we dissociate Kavanaugh from Rove and Rove's political projects? It's very difficult to do when the recently published emails reveal his deep involvement in the fight for Owen's appointment, about which Rove cared so deeply. It's even harder to do because Rove has become one of the most vocal proponents of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court appointment. Rove says Kavanaugh was the retail man who played a critical role in developing and promoting the Bush team's strategies – to the point where the political operator greets the candidate as a man who understands the agenda of the administration and "crystallizes" it.

The fight for Owen's nomination was one of the busiest and longest judicial selection struggles of the Bush presidency. It was incredibly high profile. It was incredibly controversial. It lasted for years before, finally, an agreement was reached in 2005 that (after a Senate vote of 55-43) put Owen on the fifth circuit bench. Even then, Rove and his allies in the administration have not given up on advancing Owen; Appointing him to the United States Supreme Court was so serious that Senate Chief Harry Reid would have threatened to obstruct the attempt.

Now the man who the emails reveal was at the heart of the merciless struggle to confirm that Owen is himself a Republican candidate for the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh desperately tries to bury the past. He is accused of having lied under oath to do so. This is an extremely serious question. But what he's trying to hide is just as serious. Kavanaugh does not want people to know that he supported and supported Karl Rove's legal wiles, that he was part of the cabal that, for political ends, sought to rally the courts with right-wing judicial activists.

In this he is intelligent. Even Brett Kavanaugh must recognize that a lawyer who, by all means, was closely associated with Rove's willingness to make the federal judiciary a pawn in his political game has crossed a line of recusation for a Supreme Court candidate.