Trump’s Supreme Court pick would solidify court’s conservative bent, experts say

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Local politicians, activists and others participate in a protest in Union Square to support a woman’s right to choose and to denounce President Donald Trump’s selection of Brett Kavanaugh as his nomination to the Supreme Court on July 10, 2018, in New York City.

He’ll have to work to gain the vote of a sceptical Rand Paul (R-Ky.) over the government’s surveillance powers.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from CT and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said his colleagues should press Kavanaugh to commit to recusing himself from cases involving Mueller’s investigation.

On a dissonant note, Kavanaugh declined to sign on to another dissenting opinion that argued unaccompanied minors had no constitutional right to abortion.

How will those Senate Democrats vote against a Supreme Court nominee who is popular with voters?

Senators will be seeking access to Kavanaugh’s writings and correspondence, reams of documents that will take weeks to compile and even longer to review, giving opponents ample opportunity to wage a political battle.

“The majority apparently thinks that the government must allow unlawful immigrant minors to have an immediate abortion on demand”, he wrote in language that Senate Democrats are now using against him to pressure members to vote “no” on his nomination. Republican Sen. Rand Paul reportedly took issue with Kavanaugh’s rulings on health care, which could be a concern due to Republicans’ small margin for error in the Senate.

Murkowski is one of two key female GOP senators who will play a key role in Kavanaugh’s path to confirmation.

On Tuesday, Jody Rabhan, who directs NCJW’s Washington operations, said that Kavanaugh, like the other candidates considered by Trump, was “terrible on the issues that we care about”.

Liberals are also pointing to Kavanaugh’s dissent in Priests for Life v. HHS to argue he nearly certainly would vote to heavily restrict abortion rights or even topple Roe v. Wade.

He says he will fight the nomination “with everything I have”, and warns that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, “women’s reproductive rights would be in the hands of five men on the Supreme Court”. Susan Collins of ME and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Democrats are likely to confront Kavanaugh with those words when he sits for his confirmation hearing. “We are turning to Senator Collins to say we need you in lockstep with our patients”. He said the majority opinion was “based on a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong: a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in USA government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand”.

Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, told Al Jazeera that his organisation’s immediate call of action would be to “have its members across the USA express their views to senators in their states and urge them to oppose this nomination”.

And pity poor Judge Thomas Hardiman, who just missed out on being the President’s first Supreme Court pick, and was the unlucky bridesmaid again.

Hannity said of another potential Trump choice, Amy Coney Barrett, that “she’s next”. Nonetheless, he later told associates he was impressed by her and her large family, including one child with special needs and two adopted from Haiti, and that he hoped to save her as a future pick for the high court once she has more experience on the federal bench. Making reference to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, he wrote that “the regulations substantially burden the religious organizations’ exercise of religion because the regulations require the organizations to take an action contrary to their honest religious beliefs”. But he did vote to confirm Gorsuch a year ago.

“I don’t have anything right now”, he said as he left a Foreign Relations Committee meeting on Tuesday afternoon.

FBN’s Stuart Varney on the impact of President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on the midterm elections.

Congress, he wrote in The Minnesota Law Review, should pass a law that would temporarily protect the president from both civil suits and criminal prosecution.