Leftwing Idiots: Kavanaugh is a "Radically Conservative," Ultra-"Partisan" Judge

You had me at "radical."

Important to note for this (the leftwing writers forgot to mention it): The DC Circuit Court of Appeals was a special target for Democrats, and was stocked to the brim with lefty fish. Indeed, the desire to stock the DC Circuit Court full of liberals was a prime reason Miguel Estrada was filibustered, and then why Harry Reid ended the fillibuster of federal judges (below the Supreme Court level), to push in their leftwing judges above conservative objections.

So Kavanaugh's dissents will tend to be dissents against a very left-wing circuit.

In federal appeals courts, cases are usually decided by three-judge panels. Across the D.C. Circuit during Kavanaugh's tenure there, 3 percent of the votes were dissents. But Kavanaugh cast a dissenting vote 7 percent of the time. When Kavanaugh authored the opinion, 14 percent of the time the co-panelists dissented against him, compared to only 10 percent of opinions that provoked dissents when he wasn't the author. In contrast to this rift-making, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch -- as well as previous nominees rejected for being divisive, such as Merrick Garland and Robert Bork -- generated more agreement than Kavanaugh relative to their peers on the opinions that they wrote.

We also found that was extremely polarizing in his votes. We measured how dissents vary with the party affiliation of the president who appointed judges. (For the sake of our research, judges elevated by a Republican president are "Republicans," and vice versa.) Judges who tend to dissent mostly against those appointed by the opposing party's president contribute to "vote polarization." When sitting with two panelists appointed by Democrats, Kavanaugh dissented 19 percent of the time; in other cases, he dissented 5 percent of the time, which is nearly double the rate of his colleagues. Kavanaugh's vote polarization is especially clear in cases relating to constitutional, civil rights and due process law. (In a recent abortion case, for example, he dissented against the Democrat-controlled majority ruling that guaranteed an undocumented immigrant's right to an abortion while in state custody.) Gorsuch and Bork, by contrast, did not display the same degree of vote polarization. Garland was actually more likely to cross party lines than his D.C. Circuit colleagues did.

He'll do.

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:40 PM

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