Judge Kavanaugh delivered a temporary victory to conservatives in October, 2016 when he wrote an opinion declaring the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- a powerful banking industry watchdog proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren -- to be unconstitutional. Writing for a three-judge panel, Kavanaugh said the 2010 Dodd-Frank law had wrongly placed "enormous executive power" in the CFPB's single director, which Republicans and the banking industry want to replace with a multi-member commission. Supporters of the CFPB accused Kavanaugh of acting as a partisan activist, and the constitutionality of the CFPB's structure was upheld by the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018.
In 2012, Kavanaugh wrote a decision that rejected the EPA's attempt to curb air pollution that crosses state lines. He has often leaned toward restricting the EPA's powers when he believed the agency lacked specific authorization from Congress, including in courtroom comments surrounding the Obama administration's climate rules for power plants.
In a 2014 ruling concerning an EPA rule on toxic mercury from power plants, Kavanaugh wrote in a dissent that EPA had acted wrongly in not weighing costs when it first decided to write the regulation. A year later, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court ruling converted Kavanaugh's reasoning into the majority. Pollution should not be a partisan issue--even Richard Nixon supported the Clean Air Act--but it is. Judge Kavanaugh is not independent on environmental issues. He is on the wrong side of this partisan divide.
Separation of Church and State
Kavanaugh has suggested that he may be open to widening the flow of public funding to religious schools. In an essay last year for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh supported the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's efforts to reverse prior Supreme Court attempts at "erecting a strict wall of separation between church and state" -- especially when it comes to schools. He also predicted during a CNN appearance in 2000 that the court would one day uphold school vouchers. Kavanaugh wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in December, 1999 in favor of a Texas high school's policy allowing the use of a public address system for prayers at school football games. Judges must be firm in their resolve to keep government out of religion and religion out of government. Judge Kavanaugh has shown that he will not do that.
We Should Separate Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court
I have not found a single case where Judge Kavanaugh parted company with the conservative agenda. Justice Kennedy, who Kavanaugh was nominated to replace, strayed from the Republican Party line on gay rights and abortion. Justice Kennedy had a reasonable sense of justice and independence, but did participate as a Republican partisan in Bush v . Gore and Citizens United. Some Republican appointees have had a strong sense of justice and independence, including Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens. Not only is Kavanaugh a rigid Republican, he does not appear to have a fundamental sense of justice, or independence, and should not be confirmed to the highest court in the land.
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