0:00:00.1 Brett Kavanaugh: This is a circus, the consequences will extend long past my nomination.

0:00:12.0 Leon: Hey, everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects. On this week's subscriber-only episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon and Michael tell the story of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his rise through the ranks of the conservative legal establishment. As listeners of the show surely remember, Kavanaugh was accused during his confirmation hearings in 2018 of sexually assaulting a young woman during a teenage party. During those hearings, Kavanaugh presented himself as the victim of a smear campaign.

0:00:42.1 Brett Kavanaugh: My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional accusations.

0:00:51.8 Leon: In the end, Kavanaugh was confirmed, and now he's on the Court for life. This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

0:01:06.4 Peter: Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left our country bitter and screaming, like a Supreme Court Justice accused of sexual misconduct.

0:01:16.7 Rhiannon: Wowie.

0:01:18.4 Peter: I am Peter. I'm here with Michael.

0:01:21.9 Michael: Hey, everybody.

0:01:24.1 Peter: And Rhiannon.

0:01:25.4 Rhiannon: Hello.

0:01:26.4 Michael: Very topical.

0:01:26.5 Peter: Yeah.

0:01:26.6 Rhiannon: That's right. It's relevant, it's germane.

0:01:28.7 Peter: I don't often tie in the metaphor, but I was pretty low on ideas this week. Today we are talking about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his life, his work, his enormous head.

0:01:44.8 Rhiannon: Big toe looking ass.

0:01:48.7 Peter: We wanted to do a premium Patreon-only episode about Kavanaugh as the second in our series of premium episodes about Supreme Court Justices past and present. Our very first premium episode was about Antonin Scalia, and we are working our way down the list of Catholic galoots, and we have gotten to Brett Kavanaugh. Now, the question we get the most about Brett Kavanaugh is: What's going on with this guy? And so we are here to try to answer that question. I've spent the last week or so deep diving into Brett, and my primary thesis remains unchanged: Brett Kavanaugh is best described as a guy.

0:02:41.9 Rhiannon: Yes, yeah.

0:02:42.5 Peter: He is one of the more guy-like dudes I've ever seen. He's smart, but not in a particularly unique or interesting way, more of in like a guy way, like he's a smart guy.

0:02:53.6 Rhiannon: Smart guy.

0:02:54.6 Peter: He's sort of the epitome of white and wealthy privilege in a lot of ways, like of course, not every white guy can leverage his position as a white guy into a seat on the Supreme Court. But only a rich white guy could lead the life Brett Kavanaugh has lived, right?

0:03:12.6 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:03:13.5 Peter: Just sort of effortlessly drifting higher and higher until he hit society's ceiling, like a balloon that a child let go in Grand Central Station and you look up there and there it is, there's Brett. That is the definitive quality in my view of Brett Kavanaugh.

0:03:31.2 Rhiannon: Yeah, that's well put.

0:03:32.6 Peter: So I think it makes sense to walk through his life a little bit. So Rhi, what was a young Brett Kavanaugh like?

0:03:40.9 Rhiannon: Oh, boy. Yeah, let's dive right in, huh? So Brett Michael Kavanaugh, he was born on February 12th.

0:03:48.1 Peter: Brett Michael?

0:03:48.9 Rhiannon: Brett Michael, yeah, born on February 12th, 1965. This means he is an Aquarius with a Cancer Moon, by the way, so...

0:03:58.3 Michael: Kicking off this episode right.

0:04:02.7 Peter: We're cutting all of this.

0:04:02.8 Rhiannon: No. This is my part.

0:04:02.7 Peter: This is what it's like to podcast with girls.

0:04:05.4 Rhiannon: No, boys, don't interrupt me. This is my part, okay? Abolish the Lawboy, honestly.

0:04:09.2 Michael: Yeah, for shame.

0:04:09.8 Rhiannon: Okay, if you know anything about anything, you know that Brett Kavanaugh being an Aquarius Sun with a Cancer Moon makes total sense, okay? This guy, Brett O Kavanaugh, would of course be stacked with water placements, okay.

0:04:24.1 Michael: Sounds right.

0:04:25.2 Rhiannon: As we progress through this episode, it will start to make even more sense. He has the same birthday as Abraham Lincoln, Gucci Mane, Charles Darwin, Darren Aronofsky. Honestly, all of these people are messy bitches who lived for drama, okay. So Brett Kavanaugh.

0:04:40.9 Peter: Are they? Is that how you would describe Darren Aronofsky and Abraham Lincoln, Gucci Mane and Charles Darwin?

0:04:46.6 Rhiannon: Absolutely. Yeah, have you seen Requiem for a Dream? Anyways...

0:04:58.6 Peter: Oh, my God, How much longer does this keep going?

0:05:03.5 Rhiannon: Alright, okay. He was born in Washington DC. His dad, Everett Edward Kavanaugh, Jr., was a lawyer who served as a long-time president of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association, okay, skincare king, and his mom was a high school history teacher until also getting a law degree a little bit later in her life, and she worked as a circuit court judge in Maryland in the late '90s. So Brett Kavanaugh grew up an only child, and he attend...

0:05:32.1 Peter: You didn't need to tell me that, but...

0:05:34.7 Rhiannon: And he attended the prestigious and honestly kind of notorious Georgetown Preparatory for high school. So if you're a regular person who doesn't keep tabs on where wealthy DMV area Catholics are sending their darling boys to high school, I will describe Georgetown Prep thusly. It is a place where already wealthy families send their sons so that one day their sons can continue to be wealthy. Alumni include a bunch of Kennedy family offspring, for example, the Shrivers, people who ended up becoming senators, people who ended up becoming owners of professional sports teams, a bunch of basic bitches like that.

0:06:12.1 Rhiannon: So Brett Kavy was a member of the class of 1983 at Georgetown Prep. He was the captain of the basketball team, he also played football, and for the most part, he was known as a really good student, but also a member of an especially booze-fueled clique of classmates, who partied hard and they didn't really do much to hide it. Side note, he attended Georgetown Prep at the same time as another Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who was just two years behind Kavanaugh, and apparently, just to give you guys all of the hot juicy goss, the two guys hate each other to this day.

0:06:51.3 Rhiannon: Gorsuch was not part of the same social circle that Brett Kavanaugh was in, probably because by 14 years old, Neil Gorsuch was lecturing everyone within earshot on like the catechism and the inner working of the Papal conclave. So these two guys are polar opposites, but like in equally insufferable ways, you know?

0:07:12.3 Peter: Right.

0:07:12.3 Michael: Yes.

0:07:12.9 Peter: You know how in like, I think it's Norse mythology, hell is cold?

0:07:15.9 Rhiannon: Sure.

0:07:16.4 Peter: That's how I view the Neil and Brett Kavanaugh dynamic, right? It's just two different types of hell, two different conceptions of hell.

0:07:28.2 Rhiannon: Yeah. Yeah, two Satan figures.

0:07:30.5 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:07:31.4 Michael: I mentioned that BK and his buds didn't do much to hide their alcohol-induced shenanigans in high school, and this is evidenced in their own yearbooks, which include tons of thinly veiled inside jokes that reference how drunk they were all the time, and their gross awkward sexcapades, all of that stuff. So Bordy K takes his fratty inclinations with him to college, which he attends at Yale University, where he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. In 1985, while he was in college, a police report identifies Kavanaugh as being involved in a bar fight after a concert one night, and a friend who was there later told the New York Times that the whole fight started because Brett threw a beer in a guy's face, after some really silly comments, something that was quote "semi-hostile," so dudes in the wild, just being dudes, you know.

0:08:24.7 Peter: The other guy was probably like, Why are you wearing a tie?

0:08:30.2 Rhiannon: Right, right, right.

0:08:31.3 Michael: Here's what I'm gonna say, is that this episode is going to be very critical of our friend and enemy, Brett.

0:08:37.2 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:08:38.1 Michael: But I just want to say that I think someone who got drunk in college, went to a concert and then got into a brawl should not be barred from attaining any high office personally.

0:08:53.2 Rhiannon: Uh-huh. I see, okay.

0:08:54.3 Michael: It's something I feel very passionately about, as a matter of fact.

0:08:57.8 Rhiannon: Yeah, right.

0:08:58.6 Michael: I don't think it should be an impediment to your career aspirations. Anyone's, certainly.

0:09:02.6 Rhiannon: Noted.

0:09:03.3 Peter: One of Michael's many, completely selfless opinions.

0:09:06.0 Michael: Yeah.

0:09:07.4 Rhiannon: Okay, so fast forward, Bretty K gets into Yale Law School, where he definitely deserved to go, and...

0:09:14.4 Peter: He just walked right over to the law school, he's like, Hey, I'm here now.

0:09:16.0 Rhiannon: Yeah, this guy is super special. That's right. So classmates at Yale Law say Brett Kavanaugh wasn't particularly political or partisan at all, much less like an explicitly conservative thinker, right. Like you wouldn't even be able to tell which way he leaned politically, except that during law school, he did start to sort of boldly and unabashedly cultivate these relationships with the most influential conservative professors. And in the eyes of multiple of his classmates, this wasn't so much about Kavanaugh genuinely holding conservative beliefs or like having any sort of authentic interest in conservative causes, it was more about making a name and a career for himself in a field that was sort of seen as already being over-saturated with liberals.

0:10:06.0 Peter: Right.

0:10:08.7 Rhiannon: So, because this is the way things work at Yale, even though literally nothing in his background or academic career is exceptional, Kavanaugh got a prestigious spot as a clerk on the Ninth Circuit for one of the worst of the worst, Alex Kozinski. Yeah, notorious sexual harasser, a terrible conservative judge, we've talked about him before. And that clerkship, of course, opened the door for his next job after law school, a clerkship for Justice Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme Court. So again, even at this point, Brett Kavanaugh's peers say he wasn't so much a staunch conservative as a staunch schmoozer, he was really just known for sidling up to whoever, even liberals, as he tried to make a name for himself in DC legal circles.

0:10:56.3 Peter: So In the early '90s, Kavanaugh has a brief fellowship for the Solicitor General, Ken Starr. Now, a couple of years later, in 1994, Starr gets tapped to lead an independent investigation into Whitewater, a scandal involving allegedly shady real estate dealings by the Clintons. Starr brings young Brett Kavanaugh on board, initially thinking it would take just a few months. Instead, over the course of the next four years, the Starr investigation becomes sort of a clearing house for Republican grievances against the Clintons. They ranged from more or less accurate accusations of misconduct against Bill to far-flung right-wing conspiracy theories. A good barometer for measuring the accuracy of allegations against the Clintons is if it involves someone getting murdered, it's probably not true. If it involves Bill doing sexual misconduct, it probably is.

0:11:53.5 Rhiannon: Oh, no, yeah.

0:11:55.9 Michael: Either way, Brett has looked into it.

0:12:01.0 Peter: So what starts as an investigation into some real estate shenanigans snowballs into a massive inquiry into various alleged misdeeds, including Bill's misconduct with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

0:12:17.0 Rhiannon: You've heard of her.

0:12:17.6 Peter: Hey, I don't need to rehash that situation, I imagine, but if you don't know of it, you gotta hit that Wikipedia ASAP, okay? It is juicy. So Kavanaugh is part of this, he makes a name for himself by encouraging sexually explicit lines of questioning during Bill Clinton's deposition. He circulated a memo saying that Clinton, quote, "disgraced his office, the legal system and the American people," unquote. Joke's on you, buddy. The legal system was already disgraced, and the presidency for that matter, you know what?

0:12:51.2 Rhiannon: That's right, yeah.

0:12:52.8 Peter: So the Starr report, the report that was ultimately issued about all of these investigations in 1998, ends up being one of the most overtly partisan reports from an independent counsel in history, and a bit of a lightning rod, to say the least. Kavanaugh wrote the portion arguing in favor of impeachment, and his career as a partisan hack appears to be off and running.

0:13:13.6 Michael: That's right.

0:13:14.7 Rhiannon: Yeah.

0:13:15.2 Michael: I'm not the person who's coined this phrase before, but I've seen him compared to like Forrest Gump in his seeming like appearance in every sort of major political event of the '90s and early '00s. And so in addition to like the Starr report, he also was pro bono counsel for the Miami-based relatives of Elian Gonzales. I don't know if you remember that whole thing, the young Cuban boy whose mom had died en route to the States, and there's a debate about whether or not to send him back to Cuba, and Brett was there to argue in favor of keeping him here, and a little more...

0:13:55.6 Peter: Yeah, by the way, the argument in favor of sending him back to Cuba was his father was there.

0:14:00.8 Michael: And wanted him back.

0:14:03.0 Peter: The argument in favor of keeping him in the United States was that the United States rules.

0:14:05.9 Michael: Yes, that was it. That was it.

0:14:10.3 Peter: Yeah, that also marks the only time in American history that a young immigrant child was welcomed into the country, at least recently.

0:14:19.7 Michael: Just begging to keep him.

0:14:19.8 Rhiannon: Right, right, right. Only as a political tool, right?

0:14:22.5 Michael: Yeah. But more notably, he was involved in the seminal case of I think the last 100 years, probably, well, maybe not 100 years, but at least 50 years, and the first case we discussed on this podcast, Bush v. Gore, he was on the legal team for George W. Bush. There are some rumors that he was at the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot, though I have not been able to confirm those rumors, but...

0:14:46.0 Peter: He's got the attire.

0:14:48.9 Rhiannon: Yeah, mm-hmm. He looks the part.

0:14:50.0 Michael: He's like the right age, the right set, like it would totally make sense for him to have been there. But yeah, so he was counsel on that, which famously argued for stopping the recount of the votes in Florida and handing the election to George W. Bush, which was done successfully, and you might think, well, good for you, you're a partisan hack, but that's what partisan hacks do, they advocate for their party, but interestingly, he's a big believer in Bush v. Gore, he's proud of it.

0:15:20.8 Rhiannon: Oh, yeah.

0:15:22.0 Michael: Like not just his work, but the decision. He's taught at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown throughout the years, and he has said that he makes a point of teaching Bush v. Gore that it's a forgot about opinion that a lot of con law and stuff, professors avoid, and we've criticized academia for doing that, but he teaches it for the exact wrong reason, 'cause he thinks it's like great law, and le especially loves like William Rehnquist's concurrence and all this shit. It's unbelievable, it's like truly unbelievable. I think a good sort of highlight to how much he's tied to, I think, the Republican party more so than the conservative movement and its ideological goals.

0:16:06.6 Peter: After Bush v. Gore, Kavanaugh spent some time in private practice. Ken Starr had landed him a gig working for the prestigious big law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. One of the perks of these sort of cushy, high-flying legal positions is that big law firms will just hand you partnerships to increase their own access to power. So Kirkland & Ellis made Kavanaugh a partner, actually while he was still working on the Starr investigation in 1997, when Kavanaugh had no real law firm experience and was 32 years old.

0:16:36.1 Rhiannon: Wow.

0:16:37.8 Michael: Jesus.

0:16:39.7 Peter: So Kavanaugh then takes a job with the Bush White House in June of 2003 as the staff secretary, which from what I am able to glean is just a fake job that presidents use to reward political allies.

0:16:53.1 Rhiannon: That sounds right.

0:16:54.4 Peter: It turns out that the position was probably designed to either pad his resume a bit or just maybe to serve as a placeholder, because the very next month Bush nominates him for a spot on the prestigious DC circuit of appeals. But the nomination languishes. Democrats are concerned they're being asked to appoint a partisan hitman, and it's not until there is a shift in power a few years later in 2006 that he finally gets confirmed. And in all of this, I think Brett learns a bit of a lesson, and he spends some time rebuilding his image, and this sort of rebuilding phase lasts until his nomination to the Supreme Court in a lot of ways.

0:17:35.3 Rhiannon: Yeah.

0:17:36.8 Peter: He recants much of his role in the Starr investigation, and he just sort of lays low, takes some part-time teaching gigs. Harvard dean Elena Kagan gave him one at Harvard, he does some light scholarship, and he's just sort of chilling. The only real notable thing about this is that some of the scholarship he did was about how he sort of believes in unfettered executive power, which was quite beneficial, theoretically, at least, to Donald Trump, which perhaps accounts for Kavanaugh getting the second slot once Trump was in office.

0:18:11.7 Rhiannon: For sure.

0:18:12.0 Michael: Yeah, and I think his jurisprudence on the DC circuit is pretty interesting and interesting considering it's sort of like a rebuilding phase for his reputation, like sort of through that light, because he was pretty reliably conservative, but I think in a way that is easily read as sort of pragmatic and, again, more aligned with like sort of the political part of the Republican Party, more so than like the legal movement, which can be a lot more doctrinaire and extreme, actually. And so in the DC circuit, almost half his cases were regulatory, which is pretty typical, and he was very conservative there, reining in usually the Obama administration regulations in a way that was at once both sort of confining to agencies overall without going like the full-throated, like the administrative state is illegal approach, right?

0:19:10.6 Rhiannon: Right, right. Yeah.

0:19:11.6 Michael: He had sort of similar tacks, he had an abortion case, which we'll probably talk a little bit more about later, but he charted a middle ground there where he was to the left of some of his more conservative colleagues, but to the right of the liberals, and I think sort of interestingly, he had an ObamaCare case called Seven-Sky v. Holder before the Supreme Court ruled on ObamaCare in the first instance. And there he, one, would have passed on the case, he said that essentially, the case was premature because the individual mandate wasn't even in full effect, and so they should be very careful about proclaiming loudly about this one way or another, but if they weren't gonna rule on the merits, he had this interesting take on it, which is I think very unique amongst all the lower court conservative judges writing about ObamaCare at the time.

0:20:02.5 Rhiannon: Yeah, yeah.

0:20:03.7 Michael: So I just want to quote it really quickly. He says: "This case also counts as restraint because we may be on the leading edge of a shift in how the federal government goes about furnishing a social safety net for those who are old, poor, sick or disabled and need help. The theory of the individual mandate in this law is that private entities will do better than government in providing certain social insurance, and that mandates will work better than traditional regulatory taxes," blah, blah, blah. "Privatized social services combined with mandatory purchase requirements of the kind employed in the individual mandate might become a blueprint used by the federal government over their next generation to partially privatize the social safety net and government-assisted programs and move, at least to some degree, away from the tax and government benefit model that is common now." So this is a guy who's saying, Look, we want to privatize Social Security, we want to privatize Medicare, we want to privatize Medicaid. And what's it gonna look like?

0:21:03.4 Michael: It's gonna look like this. So why the fuck are you... Are you trying to say this is unconstitutional, right? He's like thinking about it completely differently than all these other conservatives. It's no less conservative, but it's more Republican, right, it's more like what's the Republican Party's trying to do, not what's a conservative goal about the Commerce Clause and the size of the government and blah, blah, blah.

0:21:31.1 Peter: This was also a little before, like the fringe turn of the Republican Party really hit its stride, right?

0:21:36.2 Michael: Yeah. And so this is a guy who's coming out of the Bush administration, which did try to privatize Social Security, and it feels like something that's out of step now with the modern party, but I think fits an image of someone who considers himself pragmatic, right, and he clearly has policy goals and an agenda, and I don't actually think he's that shy about it, but I don't think he thinks of himself as doctrinaire, and I don't think it comes across as doctrinaire in his circuit opinions.

0:22:04.5 Peter: Right.

0:22:07.2 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:22:09.3 Peter: So we are now a couple of years into Trump's presidency, alright, put yourself there. What was that like? What were you feeling?

0:22:14.0 Rhiannon: Hell.

0:22:15.5 Michael: Well, I was cruising. What are you talking about? We were doing Mic Dicta, right?

0:22:20.2 Peter: Oh, God. [0:22:20.6] ____.

[laughter]

0:22:23.6 Peter: So, Kavanaugh is nominated to the Supreme Court on July 2nd, 2018, reportedly one of four or five judges on Trump's shortlist, which included Amy Coney Barrett. Kennedy, Anthony Kennedy, who had stepped down, reportedly campaigned for Kavanaugh, his former clerk. He said, that guy had a good firm handshake or whatever fucking stupid bullshit, Kennedy bases his decisions on.

0:22:50.5 Michael: I do want to say in favor of Kennedy, though, that this approach is far superior to some sort of fucking prideful insistence on staying on long past the point of good judgment, right?

0:23:04.7 Rhiannon: Absolutely.

0:23:04.8 Peter: I mean, it's a savvy move. It is funny, a lot of people praised Kennedy throughout his career because he was the centrist, right, he would dip left on various things. I he actually cared about those things, he would not have campaigned for Brett Kavanaugh, who he obviously knew was going to go to the right on various important issues.

0:23:26.2 Rhiannon: Exactly.

0:23:27.3 Peter: Kennedy probably doesn't really care about those issues, and so he campaigned for Brett Kavanaugh. The Washington Post reported that Kavanaugh was expected to vote more conservatively than life-long nemesis Neil Gorsuch, but probably a little less conservative than the absolute freaks on the far right wing, the Alitos, the Thomases. And then I guess initially, Kavanaugh's sort of years of moderating his image seemed to pay off, he got the usual round of "I knew Kavanaugh in law school, and I don't agree with his politics, but I would love to see him on the Supreme Court." [chuckle]

0:24:00.9 Rhiannon: Right, because none of this matters to me personally.

0:24:07.5 Peter: Yeah, yeah. Brett Kavanaugh once opened the door for me...

0:24:10.6 Michael: I sneezed, he said, "Bless you."

[chuckle]

0:24:15.1 Peter: Yeah, so all of that shit started happening, but then things went a little bit sideways, didn't they?

0:24:19.8 Rhiannon: Yes, they very much did. So, as everybody listening, I'm sure, remembers, most of the media frenzy and the fervor during the nomination process for Brett Kavanaugh and then into the confirmation hearings, of course, was centered around the allegations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who, upon hearing that Brett Kavanaugh was on Trump's shortlist to be nominated, she contacted the Washington Post, as well as her Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, to report that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school. And so we want to make clear that what we're discussing today is not the veracity or debating the veracity of Dr. Blasey Ford's accusations, though I'm speaking for myself, I believe her and there was nothing that Brett Kavanaugh said in response that convinced me otherwise.

0:25:07.3 Rhiannon: And so we just want to talk about how her story really contributed to this significant departure from norms around the confirmation hearings and what a circus the Senate made of it as a result, right. So in sum, just a brief kind of overview of Blasey Ford's allegations, she recounted that at a party during the summer of 1982 when she was 15 years old and Brett Kavanaugh was 17, Kavanaugh held her down on a bed while he groped her, he tried to take her clothes off, he covered her mouth while she screamed and that made it hard for her to breathe.

0:25:44.1 Rhiannon: She said that she believed in the moment that he was going to rape her and that he might kill her by suffocation. Blasey Ford, of course, was questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee during an additional day of public hearings that was scheduled specifically to discuss her allegations, and Kavanaugh testified right after her on the same day. And I'm sure people remember this sort of stark difference between the two people's testimony, right? Blasey Ford was seen as solemnly and truthfully recounting what it was that she remembered and saying upfront the things that she didn't remember, talking about her personal motivation for reporting, making it public, and the consequences that had already sort of fallen on her for coming out with the story, and then in contrast, everybody also remembers...

0:26:31.1 Brett Kavanaugh: No, no, no, no, no, no.

0:26:32.2 S?: I thought it wasn't a set up...

0:26:34.0 Brett Kavanaugh: I got this up, I'm gonna talk about...

0:26:34.6 Rhiannon: Brett Kavanaugh taking the mic and just going full sicko mode toddler, literally crying.

0:26:42.2 Brett Kavanaugh: In ninth grade in 1980, I started...

0:26:45.3 Rhiannon: Screaming about how he likes beer.

0:26:48.9 Brett Kavanaugh: We drank beer, we liked beer.

0:26:49.1 Rhiannon: Asking Senator Klobuchar whether she has a drinking problem.

0:26:51.8 Brett Kavanaugh: You're asking about blackout, I don't know, have you?

0:26:54.5 Amy Klobuchar: Could you answer the question?

0:26:56.6 Rhiannon: Great television, not great society.

0:26:59.1 Peter: A little bit more antagonistic than we were all used to.

0:27:01.5 Rhiannon: Right, yeah.

0:27:02.2 Michael: Not hard to imagine this guy getting into a drunken brawl.

0:27:06.5 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:27:07.3 Michael: Not just in college, but like at any moment... At a moment's notice he could be... He could be punching someone in the face.

0:27:11.8 Peter: At any moment.

0:27:13.8 Rhiannon: In addition to the Blasey Ford allegations, the sort of general chaos and bullheadedness of the Trump administration kind of combine to make Kavanaugh's confirmation process a norm-breaking extravaganza. And it really paved the way for another rushed and honestly giddy norm-breaking frenzy in Amy Coney Barrett's nomination just two years later, right? So taking a step back from the Blasey Ford story, the normal procedure for Supreme Court nominees is for documents and records about their backgrounds, their careers, their past time as federal judges, all of that to be turned over to the Senate for a review before confirmation proceedings. Now, because Bart worked in the George W. Bush White House, in addition to being a DC circuit judge, there were tons of documents to review.

0:28:05.1 Rhiannon: The Library of Congress for its part was like, whoa, this is a lot of records, this is gonna take a while. And the Bush Library in Dallas, meanwhile, was like, yeah, we also have a ton of documents. So the institution that would normally have reviewed all of these documents is the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, but NARA said that it would take months to review everything because so much of Brett Kavanaugh's work was in public service already, right? So the Bush Library, in response to NARA's announcement that it was going to take months to review all of these documents, which would have delayed the confirmation hearings, the Bush Library pulled a convenient fast one and brought on private counsel to vet the records for relevance and privilege. This monstrous individual, Bill Burck, who was a managing partner at the big law firm, Quinn Emanuel.

0:29:00.8 Peter: Big heavy hitters, by the way.

0:29:02.4 Rhiannon: Oh, yeah, he was named the guy in charge of this fake vetting process, which kind of underscores how partisan this process really was, this confirmation hearing. So it's not to say that Brett Kavanaugh himself was individually represented by private counsel during the confirmation hearings, but Bill Burck and this 50-person review team were absolutely working in Kavanaugh's interest. So like Kavanaugh, Bill Burck went to Yale for undergrad and law school. He like Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski and then Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Both Burck and Kavanaugh worked for the George W. Bush White House at the same time. And Burck is a well-known conservative lawyer dipshit, who has represented multiple members of the Trump White House in other unrelated matters.

0:29:49.9 Rhiannon: So obviously working very closely with the Trump White House, Burck and that team ended up withholding 100,000 documents from public release, citing executive privilege. Burck then dumped 42,000 documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee just hours before the confirmation proceedings for Brett Kavanaugh were scheduled to begin. And then on top of that, Burck and his party hacks basically crafted their own made-up privilege designation for thousands and thousands of other documents, calling them "committee confidential," meaning only the Senate Judiciary Committee Members could see the documents and they couldn't publicly discuss them in the public hearing. So I just want to note, this is the first time that any documents in a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court Justice were called committee confidential. Bill Burck just made that up.

0:30:42.6 Peter: Right. But it's not totally uncommon to make up a new confidentiality designation. LA Confidential, right? That was one.

0:30:50.5 Michael: Great movie.

0:30:54.0 Rhiannon: So I know someone personally who worked for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Kavanaugh confirmation, and she said that these committee confidential documents were in the beginning only made available to Judiciary Committee members in hard copy, in one binder, that was located in one room, and could not be taken out. And when a supplemental FBI investigation was ordered to look into the Blasey Ford allegations, there were strict parameters set by Senate Republican Chuck Grassley, in addition to an extremely expedited timeline.

0:31:30.6 Rhiannon: So my friend also told me that people who knew more about Brett Kavanaugh, about Dr. Blasey Ford's allegations, about his career, about what he was like before, they were calling senators and they were trying to get in touch with the FBI too, and trying to say, we have information to share, and they were never contacted back by the FBI. In addition, the FBI didn't have a system set up for dealing with information coming in to the tip line that the FBI itself had created to gather more information about the allegations, so this entire sort of FBI first background check that's supposed to be done of Brett Kavanaugh and then the supplemental investigation that was supposed to be done about Blasey Ford's allegations, it was really all a joke.

0:32:15.6 Michael: Yeah. And the FBI thing gets me because what does the FBI really add in value here, right? You have only a couple of people who know the actual facts, one is saying something, another person is denying it, everything else is gossip network shit. What's the FBI doing here? It was just one of those situations, like the FBI report comes back basically inconclusive and Republicans were like, this is proof that Ford is lying. And Trump tweets like this proves that the allegations were false. I mean, what the fuck was the FBI doing? I just don't understand what that was meant to accomplish and what it actually did accomplish. Right now there are talks of investigations into that investigation, that perhaps it was done so poorly that it could be deemed malicious in some way.

0:33:03.8 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:33:05.5 Peter: I don't know anything more about that, frankly, but it certainly seemed odd at the time, right? Like it was very unclear what had just happened.

0:33:14.4 Michael: Yeah, I think there were a few things going on, but I will say, first of all, that when you see 100,000 withheld documents, 40,000-plus dumped late, some restricted in an unprecedented fashion, I don't know why you were worried then that any FBI investigation would be on the up-and-up, everything else seems very straightforwardly done and just by the book, so I'm sure the FBI investigation was too.

0:33:36.7 Peter: The FBI found that Brett was the coolest guy in the whole school.

0:33:39.7 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:33:41.5 Michael: They talked to his mom, she said he's like a great boy and would never do anything to hurt anyone.

0:33:48.1 Rhiannon: He got all A's.

0:33:49.1 Michael: Yeah, but I will say that what Peter was saying is right, that there was only a limited number of sources of information about what happened that night. That being said, there were other people present, according to Dr. Ford, and she named them, and Democrats tried to get them to come testify and could not. And part of that was because they didn't have a majority in the Senate, and the Republicans had no interest in hearing from them because they didn't want an airing out of the details anymore than they already had.

0:34:18.8 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:34:19.6 Peter: Yeah.

0:34:19.9 Michael: And so I do think there was a hope on the Democrats' part that maybe at least the FBI would talk to these people, but I think from the Republicans' point of view, it was a way to do exactly what happened, to be like, look, fine, the FBI will look into this shit and then we can put it behind us, right? And then the FBI, of course, there was no way they were gonna say, like, here's the smoking gun, we found the note that Brett wrote to himself, I can't believe I raped that girl last night.

0:34:44.8 Rhiannon: Right, yeah.

0:34:44.9 Michael: And then that it was done, and then they used that as an excuse to basically tie up the entire hearings and move on to the vote, so... And it was just an unfortunate political reality, that's what happens when the Democrats were powerless, right? Ultimately. I will say, this was a horrific hearing in a lot of ways, and I don't want to make like too light of it, but it did give rise to one of my favorite moments on Twitter, which was when Ed Whelan... Ed Whelan is like sort of a leading light in conservative legal circles, he was a Scalia clerk, he worked in the Attorney General office under the second Bush presidency, and now he leads a think tank, a conservative legal think tank, and he, also sort of cowed by how credible Blasey Ford sounded, was like thinking, Well, how could this fucking be? How could it be that Brett Kavanaugh did this?

0:35:37.5 Michael: So he busted out a yearbook and some maps, and he found a classmate of Brett's who in their yearbook looked sort of similar, pudgy white dude, brunette.

0:35:52.9 Rhiannon: Big toe, uh-huh.

0:35:56.4 Michael: Found his address in high school, showed that he lived within like a mile of Brett Kavanaugh on the same neighborhood, and then just put this guy on blast on Twitter, like maybe she just misremembered and maybe this guy raped her, just like... And this guy has like... He's like a huge name in conservative legal circles. He's got like tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, like major law professors follow him, journalists follow him, like politicians, and he's just casually accusing some dude he's never met of raping someone.

0:36:32.4 Peter: Using maps on like Zillow, right?

0:36:34.4 Michael: Yes, yes. Street maps of Zillow, it's unbelievable. Just an unbelievable moment of just like pure desperation.

0:36:46.7 Rhiannon: Right, yeah.

0:36:47.6 Peter: This was one of the most surreal points of Trump's presidency, right?

0:36:51.2 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:36:51.7 Peter: Like you get this harrowing account of assault and then what just felt like a completely impenetrable circus for 24 hours.

0:37:02.2 Michael: That's right.

0:37:02.5 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:37:02.8 Peter: And then he was a Supreme Court Justice and you were just like, What the fuck just happened?

0:37:06.8 Rhiannon: Right, right. Yes. Yes.

0:37:09.7 Peter: Like what I see when I look back at this, is like modern American conservatism in microcosm. When Professor Ford finished her testimony, public discussion was about how credible it seemed, right, to the point where there were reports that Trump was surprised by how reliable she seemed. Kavanaugh looks like he's in trouble, and then he sat down and started screaming at the members of the Judiciary Committee, and many people, pretty reasonably, I think, were like, well, this is pretty fucked up and I think he's screwed, right?

0:37:46.7 Rhiannon: He just trashed his own nomination.

0:37:50.1 Peter: The guy's a nut's job, what's he doing? And that was a misread of the situation, right?

0:37:53.1 Michael: Absolutely.

0:37:54.5 Peter: Because Kavanaugh's approach tapped directly into reactionary psychology. He wasn't the perpetrator. He was the victim, right? He was indignant at the audacity of his accusers.

0:38:06.5 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:38:08.1 Peter: That display of defensiveness and antagonism toward his opponents endeared him to the right and caused them to mobilize behind him. If he had come out all fucking apologetic, you know, "I've done terrible things in my life, I don't know," his nomination would have failed, right?

0:38:24.5 Rhiannon: Absolutely.

0:38:26.2 Peter: Kavanaugh is not said to be a big fan of Trump, or that he doesn't really like him, but his approach mimicked Trump's style of like never retreating, never admitting you're wrong. It also mimics the Republican electoral strategy. You don't try to win over your enemies, you just energize your allies, right?

0:38:43.7 Rhiannon: Exactly.

0:38:45.1 Peter: And I've said before, I think, that conservatism in some ways is not really a type of ideology per se, it doesn't have like a consistent and coherent set of ideals, conservatism is more of like a shared psychology, and self-victimization is a big part of that psychology.

0:39:02.4 Rhiannon: Exactly.

0:39:02.5 Peter: He didn't plan this, I don't think, it wasn't tactical. Conservatives reacted well to it because he reacted the way that they would, right? His anger and combativeness, it mirrored their own, and that rallied conservative politicians and media around him and ultimately propelled him to the Supreme Court. And I think that is like what jumps out to me, that is what I take away from that moment in history, is that he took the conservative mind and just put it on display for all of America.

0:39:31.0 Rhiannon: Right, we should take a break.

0:39:33.3 Michael: Yeah.

0:39:35.5 Peter: Let's take a break, and then we'll come back to discuss how Dr. Blasey Ford has leveraged these allegations to become a billionaire.

[laughter]

0:39:45.2 Peter: Alright, we are back, and I think it's time to talk about Brett Kavanaugh the Supreme Court Justice. I think the first thing to say is that he fits perfectly into a robe, he is robe-shaped, almost, [chuckle] and it really works for him. You know, in a lot of ways, his first term was just sort of uneventful, not a lot of big ticket culture war cases, the court had the gay wedding cake case that term, I think, and just sort of punts. No big abortion cases or anything. But since then things have heated up and Kavanaugh has planted himself very firmly in the court's right wing. So I think we should just go over some of the major categories.

0:40:30.6 Rhiannon: Yeah.

0:40:31.3 Peter: The first is voting rights, and I think it makes sense to touch on this, because it harkens back to his role in Bush v. Gore, quite a bit. In the lead-up to last year's election, of course, there were a number of cases about voting rights where Republican legislatures attempted to impose aggressive restrictions on voting so that their preferred candidates could win.

0:40:51.1 Rhiannon: Right.

0:40:52.5 Peter: And the Supreme Court upheld much of that effort, with Kavanaugh siding with the conservatives just about every time. He signed on to the so-called Article 2 argument, which was first popularized by Rehnquist in a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, and essentially says that the US Supreme Court can overrule state Supreme Courts on their own state's election laws. Now, that is fairly obviously a huge looming threat to voting rights, because it means that in states where there are a majority of liberal justices on the state Supreme Court, even that cannot save you, the US Supreme Court can step in and intercept.

0:41:29.9 Peter: The only caveat in this category is that Kavanaugh didn't sign on to the post-election challenge cases, which really only Alito and Thomas did. There were a handful of cases that... That were not about the pre-election voting rights, they were about post-election fraud shit, and Kavanaugh sort of seemed to be in the we gave it the old college try, and it's time to move on, guys, like let's go, 2024. Let's rig it.

[laughter]

0:41:57.0 Peter: He's also been a very reliable conservative vote on so-called freedom of religion issues. We saw him join the conservatives in striking down pandemic restrictions on religious gatherings, as we mentioned in our Brooklyn Diocese v. Cuomo episode last year, last December. We've seen him expand exemptions to employer obligations to cover contraceptive health insurance and expand the ability of religious employers to discriminate in employment. He has been, in short, in complete lockstep with the Court's right wing on these issues so far, at least as far as I've seen.

0:42:27.0 Rhiannon: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And he's been in lockstep with the conservatives on other issues too. So regarding the census, if people remember the citizenship question case, this was back in June of 2019. In a case called Department of Commerce v. New York, Justice Kavanaugh voted to empower the Trump administration to include a citizenship question on the census, which is a move sort of very plainly, obviously aimed at discouraging undocumented people from responding to the census, and therefore purposely under-counting those populations for the purpose of apportioning representatives in the federal government.

0:43:06.1 Rhiannon: In that case, the majority ruled that the Trump administration could include such a question on the census, but that the Department of Commerce had contrived its rationale for doing so. But for his part, justice Kavanaugh joined a really kind of bitter dissent that said that the Court should have allowed whatever rationale the Department of Commerce offered for it, and saying that the judiciary should have only conducted a, quote, "deferential review of discretionary agency decisions."

0:43:37.5 Rhiannon: In terms of trans and gay rights in Bostock v. Clayton County, which we did an episode on last year, you'll remember that that was a good case, in which the liberal Justices joined by Justices Gorsuch and Roberts held that Title 7 protects employees against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. In that case, Kavanaugh dissented separately, wrote his own dissent, to whine about separation of powers. He's arguing that only Congress could amend Title 7, and you know, this is essentially exactly what Justice Alito wrote in his own separate dissent, but it could be seen as Kavanaugh kind of moderating against Alito's sort of preposterous bloviation.

0:44:22.4 Rhiannon: We've noted before that Kavanaugh kind of does this, repeat a separate concurrence or separate dissent, where he's just saying the same thing that another conservative Justice is saying, but moderating the hyperbolic language of a Justice who's further right than he is.

0:44:38.0 Michael: Right. It is also, I think, especially now, worth trying to read the tealeaves a little on Justice Kavanaugh and abortion.

0:44:45.8 Rhiannon: Yes.

0:44:47.3 Michael: There hasn't been a lot of opportunity for him to really stake a claim as to where he's gonna go, but there's a big abortion case coming up next term. So one place I want to start actually pre-dates his time on the Supreme Court, and it was when he gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute several years ago, which is a conservative think-tank, and it was on Constitution Day, and he gave a speech about pod favorite William Rehnquist. And he was discussing Rehnquist's legacy and where he thinks Rehnquist made a big mark. And in that speech, he sort of approvingly discusses Rehnquist's dissent in Roe v. Wade, Rehnquist's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and some other opinions where Rehnquist carried the day, sort of limiting other, quote-unquote, "unenumerated rights in the Constitution," related to like assisted suicide and things like that.

0:45:39.3 Rhiannon: Right.

0:45:42.5 Michael: Sort of praising Rehnquist for his ability to rein in the Court sum and almost rueful that Rehnquist didn't hold the line in the abortion cases. So in the same speech, he approvingly and sort of like glowingly talked about Rehnquist's concurrence in Bush v. Gore and, as Peter mentioned, that sort of presaged his later writing in the Court about essentially wanting to make that concurrence law.

0:46:08.1 Rhiannon: Right. Right. It's obviously like a pet issue of his.

0:46:10.9 Michael: Right, exactly, that he singled like sort of four points from Rehnquist's career, and this was one of them that he thought was especially important. He took a more moderate tack in the DC Circuit when abortion came up. But that was like a weird case where there was an undocumented immigrant who was pregnant and in federal detention, and the question was whether she had a right to leave to get an abortion, and the government conceded she did, and his opinion was just that, you know, they basically could wait to get a sponsor first before letting her get an abortion, but since they didn't contest that she had the right, he wasn't gonna like quibble with it.

0:46:52.5 Rhiannon: Right, right.

0:46:53.3 Michael: So that was like sort of a... It seemed like a moderate position, but I think what he's done at the Supreme Court is a little concerning, and specifically he dissented in a case called June Medical, which we've discussed in the past, but basically related to restrictions that made it very difficult for abortion clinics to remain open, 'cause it made them act basically like they were full-fledged ERs. And a previous case just a few years earlier called Whole Woman's Health had found a law like this unconstitutional. And the only thing that changed was that Brett Kavanaugh joined the Court, and this coming up to the Supreme Court was just clearly a ploy to have a second bite at the apple.

0:47:33.3 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:47:34.0 Michael: We didn't win then, but now Kennedy is gone and Kavanaugh is here, so let's just undo that, right. Let's wind back the clock three years and get the decision we wanted then. And Roberts didn't go for that, 'cause he thought it basically made a mockery of the rule of law, but Kavanaugh went for it. He was in dissent and he was ready to essentially switch sides, right, to have the Court switch sides on an issue that quickly and that openly in such an obvious partisan manner. And I think that's gotta be concerning, there was a shamelessness about that case. And anyone who's in that dissent, Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch, I think you have to consider pretty strong votes to limit, if not entirely abandon Roe v. Wade, because it's clear they don't give a shit, right. They don't give a shit about appearances.

0:48:30.3 Michael: So I think that's gotta be concerning, like regardless of whether or not he considers himself pragmatic or moderate, I think this is an issue that means something to him, and it seems to be one where he's willing to go with the more conservative fringe elements on the Court.

0:48:51.0 Peter: Yeah, so there's obviously a dozen other areas of the law we could talk about, there's Chevron deference, which is a big one. He's a hard-liner. Chevron deference is the idea that deference needs to be given to administrative agencies and their conduct. A big deal, mostly because a lot of those agencies are useful to progressives, especially, and the ability of them to operate a little more freely is very important. Chevron deference is almost certainly dead in the water with this Court. I don't know how it gets through it as soon as it's raised. Real sort of dark waters we're treading into over there that, frankly, I don't know enough about to pontificate about, but it's disconcerting.

0:49:29.3 Rhiannon: Right, right. Safe to say it's on the list of concerns, for sure.

0:49:32.0 Peter: Yeah. The only real moderate positions that Kavanaugh has taken are on like Trump tax record subpoenas, and then again, like the election results challenges from February, which really angered some real fringe far right types, but seemed like very minor deviations in my mind...

0:49:53.8 Michael: For sure.

0:49:53.9 Peter: From like the Alito wing of the party. And I don't believe they signal any sort of leftward drift, right? But of the Justices, of these sort of more recent Trump Justices, I do think that there is more concern about him on the right than anyone else. And we've talked about his concurrences before, Rhi mentioned them, he writes these concurrences that are just sort of like, yeah, I'm gonna say the same thing as the majority, right? And we were sort of saying that he likes the sound of his own voice a little bit, and I think that's definitely part of it. Another part of it is probably sort of like a Sandra Day O'Connor, you know, moderate the reasoning, but not the conclusion sort of thing.

0:50:32.5 Rhiannon: Absolutely.

0:50:32.9 Michael: But I also think he just... There was a piece published about him recently in the Atlantic, a big theme was that he wants to be liked, right? He really wants to be liked, and I think that this sort of fits into that. He's explaining himself, right? He thinks that if he explains himself enough that that'll be enough, and maybe you'll still like him. You can contrast that with someone like Gorsuch, who's an ideologue and a doctrinalist, to a degree where he doesn't bother with any of that shit.

0:50:57.4 Michael: Before we get too far away from it, I do want to mention, like I think the tax record subpoena stuff is, I think, a good example of precisely the sort of pragmatism we were talking about earlier, like his particular form of moderation, whenever it does appear. Because they ruled against Trump, but in a way where it had no political impact for him, right? Like these were things that were not going to change the results of the election, the records weren't gonna come out and be public until well after the election, and here we are many months later, and they're still not public, right?

0:51:33.5 Rhiannon: That's right.

0:51:35.0 Michael: And so it wins like a nice bit of PR for the Court, it makes the Court look non-partisan, it is like in essence a real substantive win for the rule of law, in that the records will eventually get turned over, right? But at the same time, it doesn't materially hamper the political goals of the Republican Party, at least in the short term.

0:51:55.3 Peter: Yeah.

0:51:57.7 Rhiannon: Exactly.

0:51:57.8 Michael: And that's very much in his wheelhouse, right? That's like...

0:51:59.6 Peter: Right, and it certainly isn't enough to signal any leftward drift. I mean, first of all, keep in mind, this is, I think, an outsized concern in the right-wing mind because of what happened with Souter, right? And in reality, it's very unlikely, and it's even more unlikely with the sort of like massive brainwashing campaign they engaged in after Souter. So I don't think it's likely at all, and I think if it were likely that we were gonna see a little bit of moderation, surely we would have seen him join Roberts a little bit more on the abortion cases, etcetera. I think that tells us all we need to know.

0:52:36.9 Michael: Right. If June Medical had been 6-3 with him joining the liberals and Roberts, that would have been a big statement about like, I'm not here to just deliver partisan wins, right, 'cause that's what this was, this was a big statement that now we can just get partisan wins whenever we want, and he was like, yeah, we can. And it was only Roberts who was holding that back, and now Roberts alone with the libs can't control the majority.

0:53:00.6 Rhiannon: Right. And it's still early in terms of his opportunities to be writing opinions and stuff, there isn't a lot to look at from so far his tenure on the Supreme Court. And I think you're right, Peter, that the conservative reaction from these further right sources for sure is disproportionate, right? They're kind of overreacting to something Kavanaugh hasn't even done yet, but I also think that that is a testament to the sort of strength and machinations of the party, right? They're putting it out there publicly in the media, Brett Kavanaugh, don't you fucking dare do this, right. Do not drift leftward, we put you there for a reason.

0:53:44.2 Michael: We retired $100,000 of debt mysteriously.

0:53:47.4 Rhiannon: Right, exactly. And so are already sort of making it public that there will be kind of political and media hell to pay for Brett Kavanaugh if he doesn't do what he was placed there to do.

0:53:58.8 Peter: Contrast that with a liberal media who's in a cycle of Stephen Breyer, thank you for your service. Do whatever you want. You're great and smart.

0:54:06.9 Rhiannon: Exactly.

0:54:08.9 Peter: So we are steadily marching toward what you might call a comprehensive theory of Brett Kavanaugh. That piece I mentioned in The Atlantic is I think a pretty compelling portrayal of a man somewhat conflicted, torn between his conservatism and desire for revenge against his slanderous accusers, and his desire to be liked. He's slightly enigmatic in that regard, he's oscillated between respectable and less respectable politics for his entire career, court clerk, then a glorified political hitman targeting the Clintons, and a lawyer for the Bush campaign, then he seems to put some of that behind him. But during his confirmation hearing, he explicitly claimed the Clintons were behind the effort to oppose him.

0:54:48.8 Rhiannon: Oh, shit, I forgot about that, yeah.

0:54:53.3 Peter: He's said to idolize John Roberts and dislike Neil Gorsuch. But the distinctions between him and Gorsuch are mostly minor and academic, Gorsuch often falling to his left, as we saw in Bostock. Kavanaugh is a conservative, yes. But he's also always been a climber, and climbers are by their nature a bit more flexible and harder to pin down, and I think that leads people to be a little more confused than they should be, right. So who is Brett Kavanaugh? I've thought about this for a while. And my answer is, who gives a shit?

0:55:29.9 Michael: That's right.

0:55:30.9 Peter: Like honestly, who gives a shit? You could spend forever trying to do a psychological profile of this guy and not get anywhere productive. Whatever cute little nuances you might be able to suss out are not worth analyzing, really. Kavanaugh's been reliably conservative on almost all the big issues and will likely continue to be so for the rest of his tenure. It's truly not worth trying to parse how the details of his work and personality might manifest in minuscule little shifts on different issues. Leave that shit to some hack biographer who's hoping to churn out a $40,000 advance in 2025 or whatever the fuck. If you're a normal human being concerned about the impact of Brett Kavanaugh on your rights and the rights of the people you care about, the nuance will not matter all that much.

0:56:14.2 Michael: So I will say, I don't like doing these episodes all the time where we are sort of... We're not [0:56:22.3] ____ negative and we don't offer our listeners like either hope or something they could do, right? So one thing you can do is buy a couple cases of Keystone Light and put one outside his door and then one 10 feet away on the sidewalk, and then every 10 feet, you place another one, until you get to a very busy intersection, and then you put one in the middle of the intersection, and then you wait.

0:56:51.0 Peter: Let nature take its course. I believe we mentioned Charles Darwin earlier in the episode. This is called full circle.

0:56:58.5 Rhiannon: That's right. You're welcome.

0:57:01.3 Michael: There you go.

0:57:05.1 Rhiannon: Stupid.

0:57:07.2 Peter: Next week, we are going on even more news once again with our friends Katie and Cody to talk about the big abortion case that the Court just took for next term, that may well spell the end of Roe v. Wade. We're gonna share that episode with you guys, 'cause we think you'll like it, should be good. And before we go, we should also mention our summer line of merch just dropped, including the much-requested "Stephen Breyer retire bitch," shirts, mugs, everything you could want. Phone cases, if you are truly psychotic. There's also a version without the "bitch," right, there's a censored version for our more sensitive listeners. So head on over, fivefourpod.com/merch, check it out.

0:57:53.7 Michael: 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Rachel Ward, with editorial support from Leon Nayfakh and Andrew Parsons. Our production manager is Percia Verlin. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at CHIPS NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.