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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

I think the fact that he sided with the liberal justices in favor of Planned Parenthood was less expected [1]. Especially considering his hearings were plagued with disruptions and protests from pro-choice activists.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/10/supreme-court-plan...

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Kavanaugh agreed with Merrick Garland most of the time during his tenure at the DC court of appeals.

Presumably true, but that stat may be less telling than you think...

Last year, every Supreme Court Justice agreed with every other justice most of the time, except Sotomayor/Alito (they agreed 49% of the time)[0].

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/statistics/

Most judges agree on most cases. This is true on the Supreme Court and gets more true as you go down the hierarchy.

That doesn't mean the disagreements aren't important.

It shouldn't be surprising. Nothing about his testimony or judicial history indicated he would be particularly conservative on women's rights.

I'm sure it's surprising to the various pro-life groups who fought for his nomination.

As if they're paying attention any more, if they ever were at any analytical level.

It suggests the Federalist Society failed to do their job in vetting the candidate for ideological purity, especially since Trump was holding up the Kavanaugh nomination as a big win for his anti-abortion base voters.

The idea that “Federalist Society wouldn’t recommend anyone but a hardline anti-abortionist” somehow has become common knowledge, but it is a complete fabrication. If you go to their website’s list of their events and conferences, you’ll find more about the Clean Water Act than abortion. (Indeed, after filtering for events and talks tagged “religious liberties”—I couldn’t find anything about abortion in the first ten pages of results.) Likewise for their Twitter. It’s not really one of their issues.

The idea of Federalist Society “ideological purity” is also pretty amusing, considering that there is a large Never Trump contingency within the organization: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-conway-starts-anti-tru.... I’d wager there are a lot more pro-choice Federalist Society members than pro-life members of the American Constitution Society.

His dissents in the Garza v Hargan case kind of did.

Except Kavanaugh did argue against immigrant women being able to have an abortion while in detention. [1]

What you say may be a true statement, but it also selectively ignores the sexual assault accusations made by three women he has known. Whether or not you believe the accusations are true or false doesn't change the fact that they factor into his expectations as a judge.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/opinion/abortion-kavanaug...

Brett Kavanaugh was barely confirmed in the senate 50-48. If the small handful of individuals in the GOP who supported the legalization of abortion felt that Brett Kavanaugh would be bad for women's rights, they could've successfully rejected the nomination.

If I had to guess, he knows that when things turn back around, he wants any and all reasons for people to be on his side. Keep a close eye on his decisions post 2020.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. There would be no reason to rule either way based on the election cycle. That's the whole point.

There is definitely a reason. Supreme Court Justices have policy preferences like anyone else, and if a particular decision would hurt the electoral chances of their preferred politicians then that's a reason to go the other way.

Whether or not they actually do this is another question, but the incentive is still there even with a lifetime appointment.

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