The Left Hasn’t Given Up On Kavanaugh

The New York Times, undeterred by its failure to find any nuggets by digging through Ashley Kavanaugh’s emails as town manager of Chevy Chase, Maryland–“the records were … mundane dispatches about town business, from snow removals to local newsletters”–has now served a request for the records of any 911 calls made from Judge Kavanaugh’s home for the last 12 years.

The New York Times requests digital copies of all policing pertaining to Brett Kavanaugh, a resident of Chevy Chase Section 5. Specifically, we request all policing records, including police reports or calls of service (911 calls or otherwise), pertaining to Brett Kavanaugh, his wife, and their home address.

Somehow, I’m guessing there aren’t any. But when it comes to a Supreme Court nominee, the Times “had to try.” Of course. You remember how hard they tried to dig up dirt on Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, don’t you? Don’t you?

Then there’s this, from the New Yorker: “Brett Kavanaugh, Sportswriter.” It is one of those pieces where it’s hard to tell whether the humor is intentional. It is part of the magazine’s “The Bench” series, not normally thought of as comedy. Still, when a column includes a line like this–“Could there be hints of potential Supreme Court rulings under headlines like ‘Elis Trounce Jaspers’ and ‘Hoopsters Head West’?”–it is hard to say.

The New Yorker piece is based on 24 columns on sports that Kavanaugh wrote for the Yale Daily News as an undergraduate. It consulted “experts” to judge whether Kavanaugh’s youthful writings on sports provide clues to his judicial philosophy:

Steve Rushin, who has written for Sports Illustrated for the past three decades, saw a clue in Kavanaugh’s language. “No one was ever shooting room temperature,” Rushin observed. “Everyone was either blazing or ice-cold. In one single sentence: ‘As torrid as Yale’s shooting had been twenty-four hours earlier, it was ice cold in this contest.’” Rushin suggested this might indicate “a kind of good-evil, hot-cold, Manichean world view.”

Sure. It sounds like this “expert” is serious:

Kavanaugh the sportswriter seemed unwilling to challenge the status quo, noted J. A. Adande, who runs the sports-journalism program at Northwestern’s Medill School. “His tendency to approach his stories from the angles set forth by the coach indicates that he doesn’t want to buck authority figures,” Adande wrote in an e-mail. “It would make sense if he supported unlimited Presidential power.”

On the other hand, I think Larry Tribe is kidding. I hope so, anyway:

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor who mentored Barack Obama, zeroed in on the lead sentence in Kavanaugh’s account of a midseason game against Cornell: “In basketball, as in few other team sports, it is possible for one person to completely dominate a game.” Was this a harmless observation? Tribe noted, “Kavanaugh’s seeming fascination with single-player domination might be a muscular view of executive power.” On the other hand, he found a departure from Kavanaugh’s typical jurisprudence in “Dartmouth Rally Upends Streak.” “Kavanaugh complained that the refs let the game ‘get completely out of control’ as Dartmouth players ‘consistently hammered’ a Yalie ‘without the whistle blowing’ once,” Tribe said. “One might see in that a rare early condemnation of judicial restraint.”

Frankly, the Democrats have gone so crazy that it is hard to tell when they are being funny on purpose.

Judge Kavanaugh has one of the longest resumes of anyone appointed to the Supreme Court. He has ruled in more than 1,000 cases and has authored hundreds of opinions. The fact that liberals are seeking ammunition in his wife’s emails, in phantom 911 calls and in his teenage sports columns indicates how little they have found to criticize in Kavanaugh’s judicial record.

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