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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Comment
Sidney Blumenthal

Brett Kavanaugh has become Trump’s chief enabler on the supreme court

Brett Kavanaugh in a dark suit and blue tie stands in front of a US flag with a serious expression
‘Kavanaugh acts as though he is in an ex-officio capacity to the administration’s legal staff writing option memos.’ Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Of the conservative justices on the supreme court, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have in the current session voted most consistently, at 89 and 88%, to support Donald Trump in his cases, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet perhaps the most influential justice to advance key parts of Trump’s radical agenda has a slightly lower rating at 76%, and performed not so much by billowing lofty abstractions of originalism and textualism, but instead by contriving an assortment of glib schemes at justification.

Mayhem in the city streets, violence, even killings, renewed rounds of Trump’s threats and shakedowns around the world through damaging tariffs, and chaos within the Congress around birthright citizenship, all of which helped fracture the divided Republican leadership on the eve of the midterm elections, have followed the opinions issued by Brett Kavanaugh. By the end of this session, he has clearly emerged as the chief enabler to operationalize Trump’s most salient political issues.

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