by Hanna Bogorowski
Shortly after the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, legal experts John Yoo and Jonathan Turley weighed in on what the future with another conservative judge on the bench potentially looks like, specifically in terms of key progressive focal points.
Opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination came from Democrats’ fears that he could jeopardize women’s access to abortion, and one Democratic senator said Kavanaugh would even criminalize it.
Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said Saturday he believes Kavanaugh has other plans for the courts, at least in the beginning.
“I don’t think Justice Kavanaugh is going to be some great opponent of abortion rights or affirmative action or gay marriage at first,” Yoo said.
What he said will upset Democrats initially based on what he’s done as lower court judge in the past is going after the independence of federal bureaucracies that he says have been “spreading their power without political accountability for 20, 30, 40 years, maybe going all the way back to the New Deal.”
“I think that’s the progressive machine that’s producing law all the time that I think Justice Kavanaugh is going to be an enemy. Progressives are going to be upset about that,” he added.
Turley, a law professor at George Washington University Law school, said he thinks Kavanaugh will move the courts to the right in other areas too, and not necessarily in the places Democrats think.
“Where Kavanaugh’s likely to move the court to the right from where Kennedy left it will be in areas like criminal law, death penalty, detainer rights — those things you can expect that he will change Kennedy’s legacy,” Turley said.
The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh Saturday afternoon in a 50-48 vote, and his first day will be Tuesday after the Columbus Day holiday.
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Hanna Bogorowski is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Hanna on Twitter.
