When Clarence Thomas took a seat on the US Supreme Court in 1991, he had only barely survived a series of bitter Senate hearings on allegations of sexual harassment that divided the country. But he said he was quickly welcomed by his eight fellow justices. “After going through all those difficulties, the members of the court were just wonderful people to a person,” Thomas said in an appearance at the Library of Congress earlier this year. “So the court itself is quite different from the ordeal. It’s almost the opposite of the ordeal it took to get there.”
Brett Kavanaugh will be counting on those strong traditions of collegiality after he was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on Saturday.
Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings were rocked by university professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her in 1982, when they were both high school students.
Two other women also alleged sexual misconduct by the conservative Kavanaugh.
The accusations, as well as Kavanaugh’s angry denials and fierce criticism of Senate Democrats, widened the US political divide just weeks before congressional elections and raised concerns about the court’s reputation in US society.
Like Thomas in 1991, Kavanaugh will be joining a right-leaning court. He succeeds retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.
But the four liberal justices include 85-year-old feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made her name as an advocate for women’s rights.
Ginsburg voiced support for the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct even as Kavanaugh was about to face a grueling Senate hearing on the allegations against him.
Still, Supreme Court experts believe the justices are likely to move past any differences, as they have in the past.
“I think the justices care very much about collegiality and not purely for the sake of collegiality. They think it’s important for people who disagree with each other to work together,” said Carolyn Shapiro, who served as a law clerk for liberal Justice Stephen Breyer.
The liberal justices — Ginsburg, Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — need to seek support from at least one conservative in ideologically divisive cases, so they have a strong incentive not to alienate the new arrival, court experts said.
Kagan, known for her strategic mind, has an existing relationship with Kavanaugh. In her former role as dean of Harvard Law School, she hired Kavanaugh to teach there.
“She is practical enough that she is going to put that behind her and have the best relationship she can with someone she is going to have to put up with for 30 years,” said one Washington lawyer, who declined to be named because he argues cases at the court.
“The bigger question is Sotomayor and Ginsburg,” the lawyer added.
Sotomayor has stressed the importance of collegiality, recounting at a 2016 event how the justices often eat together after oral arguments.
“There is no topic that’s off limits. But we try to avoid controversy, so we’re very guarded about raising topics that we think might create hostility in the room,” she said.
Ginsburg was herself famously close friends with the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, with the two bonding over a shared love of opera despite their ideological differences.
Aside from his belligerent Senate appearance and his reputation as a doctrinaire conservative, Kavanaugh has been seen as a calm easy-going judge on the federal appeals court in Washington.
Supreme Court justices do not always get on, however. Most notably, several justices chafed at the leadership of Chief Justice Warren Burger, who served from 1969 to 1986.
The broader problem facing the court may be whether the circumstances of Kavanaugh’s confirmation have damaged not just his reputation but also the institution itself. — Reuters
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