“Constitutional litigation is not a game of gotcha against Congress, where litigants can ride a discrete constitutional flaw in a statute to take down the whole, otherwise constitutional statute,” Kavanaugh wrote in July in a case involving the federal ban on robocalls to mobile phones. Kavanaugh voted on the same side as Roberts more often than with any of the other justices at approximately 95% of the time. Many of his opinions would rein in President Barack Obama’s EPA regulations, but not all of them did, SCOTUS Blog pointed out. In other areas of the law as well, Kavanaugh has shied away from absolutist positions. Fewer of Ginsburg’s first set of cases were decided by a unanimous Court than Thomas’ with ten. They’re still in the process of conducting their analysis, but Feldman said that according to their method, Kavanaugh falls in the middle of the D.C. Circuit’s conservative bloc. In National Mining Association vs. McCarthy, in 2014, Kavanaugh upheld an EPA program.

Kavanaugh has proven reluctant to throw out an entire statute just because one part is unconstitutional. For one thing, lower court judges aren’t supposed to contradict the Supreme Court. Many cases in the D.C. When he voted in favor of a Louisiana abortion regulation this year, Kavanaugh wrote separately to underscore that he wasn’t offering an ultimate verdict on the law.

In recent years, a perhaps surprising coalition of four justices — Scalia, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor — have mostly held to that 2004 opinion.

But taken together, these tools can provide us with a general guide for where Justice Kavanaugh might land. Kavanaugh’s vote suggests his presence may strengthen the court’s conservative bent on capital punishment. But in his first term, Kavanaugh was not simply a strident conservative crusader. Justice Antonin Scalia exemplified this view almost 30 years ago in Mistretta v. United States: “while the doctrine of unconstitutional delegation is unquestionably a fundamental element of our constitutional system, it is not an element readily enforceable by courts.” Justice Harry Blackmun expressed widespread liberal doubts about the nondelegation doctrine while writing for the full Court in Mistretta: “our jurisprudence [on nondelegation] has been driven by a practical understanding that in our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.” Constitutionalists, by contrast, consider the nondelegation principle one of the most basic, obvious, and unjustly neglected of all constitutional principles, and Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have expressed interest in reviving this doctrine.
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. In both Nielsen and Bucklew, the Court split along ideological lines with Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority and Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer in dissent. The gold standard for measuring the ideology of Supreme Court justices is by looking at judges’ votes on cases. He has backed religious freedoms, voted against LGBT workers and sided with Trump on presidential powers and immigration issues. Viewing the Supreme Court in an entirely new light.

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Brett Kavanaugh has received President Donald Trump’s nomination for Supreme Court Justice.