by Ruth Marcus (Deputy Editorial Page Editor)
Brett M. Kavanaugh describes Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for whom he clerked and whose seat he has been tapped to fill, as his “mentor.” But Kavanaugh’s true judicial role models may be two other, significantly more conservative justices — William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia.
As it happens, Kavanaugh gave speeches last year about each of them. To read them now is to get a glimpse of a future Justice Kavanaugh, and, let’s just say, he doesn’t look much like the justice he would replace.
Speaking about Rehnquist before the American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh described the late chief justice as “my first judicial hero,” relating how, reading his opinions as a law student, “in class after class, I stood with Rehnquist.” Rehnquist, Kavanaugh said, “righted the ship of constitutional jurisprudence” during his 33 years on the court, “turning the Supreme Court away from its 1960s Warren Court approach, where the court in some cases had seemed to be simply enshrining its policy views into the Constitution, or so the critics charged.”
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