Trump can’t find any women to endorse his extremist Supreme Court pick
Brett Kavanaugh is anything but pro-woman — which might be one reason Trump couldn’t find any women lawmakers willing to write rave reviews of his Supreme Court nominee.
When Trump announced his nomination of radical right-wing judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, he sent reporters a list of 34 members of Congress who had issued statements praising Kavanaugh.
But there was one very telling problem with Trump’s list: not one of those 34 endorsers was a woman. Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, pointed out the disparity Monday night on Twitter.
There are 107 women in Congress, 29 of whom are Republicans. Trump could have asked any one of them what they thought of his nominee. He either didn’t bother, or didn’t like what they had to say.
It’s an embarrassing omission for Kavanaugh, who made a big show Monday night of bragging about his supposed pro-woman credentials. He praised his mother for inspiring him and mentioned that the majority of his law clerks have been women.
But Kavanaugh’s actual record as a judge is anything but pro-woman — which might be one reason Trump couldn’t find any women lawmakers willing to write rave reviews of his nominee.
As a D.C. Circuit Court judge, Kavanaugh infamously denied a 17-year-old immigrant access to abortion last year. His decision, which was later overruled, was as patronizing as they come.
“Kavanaugh believed that [Jane] Doe was not mature enough to decide on her own that she wanted an abortion,” Mark Joseph Stern observed at Slate. “Rather, she needed the sage counsel of a family member to help her make ‘a major life decision’ — even though she was already so determined to make that decision that she sued the government so she could follow through with it.”
In 2015, Kavanaugh also argued that Obamacare’s birth control benefit infringed on the rights of religious organizations. He wrote sympathetically about their scientifically inaccurate belief that birth control is an “abortifacient.”
As the New York Times editorial board pointed out Monday, we still don’t know the full extent of just how badly Kavanaugh will trample on Americans’ basic rights, especially women’s rights.
But we know enough.
Kavanaugh is a right-wing stalwart who has been thoroughly vetted by right-wing groups determined to reshape the Supreme Court in their image.
He was nominated by Trump, who has repeatedly vowed that his Supreme Court nominee would overturn Roe v. Wade and end legal abortion.
And Kavanaugh praises women in the same breath as he praises Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women — and who apparently couldn’t be bothered to ask a single woman serving in Congress what she thought of his nominee.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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