Tuesday round-up

Commentators continue to weigh in on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the wake of Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing last week. In an op-ed for Central Maine, Kavanaugh’s former White House colleague Sarah Day praises him as “a thoughtful leader [and] a champion of others.” For The Yale Daily News, Adelaide Feibel writes that “a few select Yalies had the chance [last week] to voice their opinions of Kavanaugh on a grand stage, before the Senate and the nation.” Lisa Keen argues at Keen News Service that Kavanaugh’s testimony “did nothing to quell concerns in the LGBT community that Kavanaugh is an ultra-conservative, maybe even anti-LGBT, jurist who will almost certainly give the Supreme Court’s existing four conservative justices the fifth vote they need to vote against the equal rights interests of LGBT people.”

Michael Tomasky writes in an op-ed for The New York Times that lobbying red-state Democratic senators up for re-election “to vote no … [is] a waste of … time and money.” In an op-ed for The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne contends that “[c]onservatives are willing to bend and break the rules, violate decorum and tradition, hide information and push Judge Kavanaugh through at breakneck speed” because “[t]hey want a Supreme Court that will achieve their policy objectives — on regulation, access to the ballot, social issues, the influence of money in politics and the role of corporations in our national life — no matter what citizens might prefer in the future.”

Jeremy Stahl at Slate suggests that “[i]f a supposedly independent jurist like Kavanaugh sees Trump’s authoritarian decrees as debatable political points rather than clear constitutional violations, then there’s no mistaking that we’ve moved into a new era in American jurisprudence.” At RealClear Policy, Erin Hawley explains why women should support Kavanaugh, arguing that “[i]f women are concerned about having an impact on the decisions that affect their lives, picking justices who will limit themselves and the Supreme Court to its constitutional role is the answer — not opposing someone who has been a champion for women for his entire career.” At ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser writes that Kavanaugh’s endorsement during his hearing of the Glucksberg test for determining when an unenumerated right is protected by the Constitution, which looks at whether the right is deeply rooted in history and tradition, “threatens a whole lot more than the right to an abortion”: “It also suggests that he believes that a wide range of Supreme Court decisions governing sex, romantic relationships, and intimacy were wrongly decided.”

At Rewire.News, Jodi Jacobson maintains that “Kavanaugh should be disqualified because he has been dishonest, dissembled, and shown a lack of ethics in handling the emails and related documents.” The editorial board of The Boston Globe urges Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me., to oppose the nomination, maintaining that “there’s a deep bench of conservative jurists to choose from, and surely the president can find one without Kavanaugh’s strained relationship with the truth.”  The editorial board of National Review explains why allegations that Kavanaugh’s testimony at earlier confirmation hearings was untruthful are “laughably frivolous.”

Briefly:

• At the Columbia Journalism Review, Alexandria Neason profiles 16-year-old Anna Salvatore, the founder of “High School SCOTUS, a blog written entirely by teens.”

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