Jesus, it's a coup

As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times.

The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday.

[...]

“I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

[...]

The court now has four conservative justices who may be willing to overturn Roe — Justices Thomas and John C. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and if he is confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could provide the decisive fifth vote.

[...]

In another e-mail, analyzing a complex May 2003 ruling by a panel of three district court judges about a campaign-finance disclosure law, Judge Kavanaugh appeared to exhibit hostility to a rule that corporate and union funds could not be used to pay for issue ads that attacked or supported a specific candidate for federal office; instead funding for such ads would have to come from separate funds and disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission.

Noting that that rule was arguably more expansive than another part of the regulations the panel had struck down, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that the decision by two of the judges to uphold that rule was “both strange and dangerous.” Fortunately, he added, the Supreme Court was likely to take a fresh look at the issue and would “not care” what the lower-court judges thought.

  NYT

Begging the question: Why are any of Kavanaugh's opinions on court cases withheld from the public?

And in yet another, he offered advice for an appeals court nominee who was scheduled to meet with two Democratic senators:

“She should not talk about her views on specific policy or legal issues,” he wrote. “She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent, that she understands and appreciates the role of a circuit judge, that she will adhere to statutory text, that she has no ideological agenda.”

Be vague. Don't let them know what you really think. Exactly his behavior in the current hearings.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.