One of the rites of passage of becoming a prominent conservative politician is that your former friends disclose private correspondences to the mainstream media. And so it has come to pass for JD Vance. One of Vance's YLS classmates gave the New York Times more than 90 emails and text messages from 2014-17. Some of the passages reflect on the Supreme Court:
In 2014, they were both near the beginning of their careers, about a year out of law school.
Mr. Vance shared that he was planning to buy a house in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Usha, whom he also met at Yale.
The Vances could afford a house in Washington's highly priced market partly because Mr. Vance was starting a job in Big Law. "Blech," he wrote then, indicating his distaste for a career he had already decided against. He would remain with the white-shoe firm Sidley Austin for less than two years.
In the same exchange, Mr. Vance also wrote about his wife's interviews with justices of the Supreme Court, where she was seeking a clerkship. Mr. Vance worried that her seeming politically neutral, or lack of "ideological chops," could harm her chances.
"Scalia and Kagan moved very quickly," Mr. Vance wrote, referring to Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice who died in 2016, and Elena Kagan, one of the court's current three liberal justices, "but she was just not going to work out for Scalia."
Nelson wrote back, "His homophobic screeds are hard to believe in 2014."
"He's become a very shrill old man," Mr. Vance responded. "I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade."
Mrs. Vance would end up clerking for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Wow. There is a lot to unpack here.
