(PresidentialHill.com)- After it was reported that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had attended a holiday party with former officials of Donald Trump’s campaign and numerous other prominent right-wing operatives, the judicial ethics of Kavanaugh came under scrutiny.
Politico Playbook shared information about a Christmas party that took place on Friday at the residence of American Conservative Union leader Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, who serves as the Director of Strategic Communications for the Trump White House. In addition to several other prominent names that Politico highlighted, Brett Kavanaugh was at the very top of the guest list-
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his wife Ginger Gaetz, Sean Spicer, Alex Acosta, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen, and Katie Miller, Chad Wolf, Greta Van Susteren and John Coale, Laura Schlapp and Bryan Wells, Brendan Carr, Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY), Erin and Nick Perrine, Erik Prince, Ziad Ojakli, Peter Davidson, Steve Holland, and Ben Terris.
According to Bloomberg, Kavanaugh’s presence at the event lends credence to concerns about his involvement in partisan activities. These concerns are especially warranted in light of recent polls that show public trust in the Supreme Court has been steadily eroding. It is common practice to criticize justices of the Supreme Court for attending events that align with their political ideologies.
Bloomberg provided the example of Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaking to the left-leaning American Constitution Society in June, and more recently, there was the speech Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave to the Federalist Society after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Both of these speeches were given after the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Tonja Jacobi, a law professor at Emory University, was quoted in an article published by Bloomberg as saying that members of the Supreme Court “should be extraordinarily careful in not only having no actual ethical difficulties but also having no appearance of an ethical conundrum.”
Given that Kavanaugh has been the target of left-wing criticism regularly for years, it is natural that his association with such a large number of prominent figures on the right has been met with about as much approval as one might anticipate on Twitter.
It is naive to think that the left and the right have not been politicizing the courts since their inception. The news regularly openly reports on the balance of political power in the Supreme Court. To suddenly get the vapors when a judge mingles with the people they have already associated them with is ridiculous.
