The Sun Gazette - The case for Brett Kavanaugh

Op-Ed

By Thomas Marino

United States Supreme Court nominations are one of the most important responsibilities the Constitution entrusts to the President of the United States.

The President has put forward Judge Brett Kavanaugh. A jurist with impeccable credentials, President Trump clearly took this responsibility very seriously and I commend his decision.

For more than a half-century, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has rewritten the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it.

Constitutional "rights" have been discovered in so-called "prenumbras" of the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court, and lower federal courts in areas where the Supreme Court has remained silent, have become policymakers, infringing on the powers of the co-equal branches of government.

Unfortunately, liberal Justices have misused the power of judicial review to read into the Constitution their policy preferences, instead of letting the Executive and Legislative branches, as well as state legislatures and Governors, determine policy as the Constitution originally intended.

One of the most important duties the court has is to police itself, recognizing the limits of its power and its proper role in our Constitutional framework.

But in order for the court to do this, a majority of its members must be Constitutionalists- Justices, like nominee Kavanaugh, who constrain themselves by adhering to the principles and words of the Constitution and its Amendments.

As a former prosecutor and House Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman, I respect Judge Kavanaugh's straightforward approach to the bench: Apply the law as written and enforce the text, structure, and original understanding of the Constitution. In his remarks accepting the nomination, Kavanaugh said, "a judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent."

Judge Kavanaugh is a former clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, an assistant to President George W. Bush, and has served for over a decade as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals- the "Second Highest Court in the Land."

A "judge's judge", the Supreme Court has endorsed his opinions more than a dozen times, including dissents that have become law of the land.

Judge Kavanaugh is respected within both liberal and conservative circles alike. A liberal professor from Yale Law School recently wrote, "It is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh."

John Malcolm, a lawyer with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said of Kavanaugh, "he is a thoughtful, strategic judge who has over time moved the direction of the law in a conservative direction, and he has done it with scalpel-like precision."

Considering those outstanding qualifications and credentials recognized across party lines, Democrats are still uproariously opposing him. In some cases, Democratic lawmakers promised to vote against the nominee before Judge Kavanaugh was even officially nominated.

This type of partisanship is exactly what is frustrating Americans across the country.

In 2006, he was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court.

During his confirmation process, he faced unjustified accusations to which he responded, "There is one kind of judge, an independent judge under our Constitution."

Judge Kavanaugh is the single most qualified person in the country to serve on the Supreme Court. He is a thought-leader among his peers on the appellate courts and deeply respected by the Supreme Court.

He is an independent judge and the judge we need to fill this critical opening on the high court.

Marino, a Cogan Station Republican, represents the 10th Congressional District, which covers much of our region.

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