Kavanaugh ’17 speech cites hot-button issues; Trump’s nominee lauded late chief justice’s Roe v. Wade dissent

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, gave a revealing speech last fall in which he lauded former Chief Justice William Rehnquist for having dissented in Roe v. Wade and for rejecting the notion of "a wall of separation between church and state."

He also praised the late chief justice's unsuccessful effort to throw out the so-called "exclusionary rule," which forbids police from using illegally obtained evidence.

All three areas of law - abortion, religion and police searches - are likely to be in flux if Kavanaugh is confirmed and joins the high court this fall.

Kavanaugh's comments are significant because they were in a speech, not a court opinion in which he was bound by precedent, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

"This is him telling us his own views. And while he doesn't come out and say 'the dissent is right,' it is pretty clear he agrees with Rehnquist," Cohen said. Agreeing with the dissent, however, would not necessarily mean that Kavanaugh would now vote to overturn a long-standing precedent.

In the speech, Kavanaugh said Rehnquist "was my first judicial hero," noting that he started law school at Yale in 1987, a year after President Ronald Reagan had elevated Rehnquist to be chief justice. Rehnquist had been the court's lone true conservative for many years, and Kavanaugh said he felt much the same at Yale.

"His opinions made a lot of sense to me. In class after class, I stood with Rehnquist. That often meant in the Yale Law School environment of the time that I stood alone. Some things don't change," he said at a Constitution Day address delivered at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

He cited five areas - "criminal procedure, religion, federalism, unenumerated rights and administrative law" - where Rehnquist moved the law to the right.

He "would be the first to say that he did not achieve full success on all the issues he cared about. But it is undeniable, I think, that he brought about a massive change in constitutional law and how we think about the Constitution," Kavanaugh said.

Kavanaugh noted that Rehnquist joined the high court in 1972, only a few months before the justices heard a challenge to a Texas law that made all abortions a crime, except those done to save the life of the mother. Along with Justice Byron White, Rehnquist "ultimately dissented from the court's 7-2 holding recognizing a constitutional right to abortion," Kavanaugh said.

The Bill of Rights did not include an explicit right to abortion, and Rehnquist believed a new, "unenumerated" right should gain constitutional status only if it was "rooted into the traditions and conscience of our people. Given the prevalence of abortion regulations both historically and at the time, Rehnquist said he could not reach such a conclusion about abortion," Kavanaugh said.

Rehnquist's dissent in Roe v. Wade said "the states had the power to legislate with regard to this matter," he added.

Later, as chief justice, Rehnquist tried, but failed by one vote, to overrule the abortion decision in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Kavanaugh did not mention it, but Justice Anthony Kennedy cast a decisive vote to preserve the right to abortion in that case.

"It is fair to say that Justice Rehnquist was not successful in convincing a majority of justices in the context of abortion, either in Roe itself or in later cases such as Casey," Kavanaugh said. "But he was successful in stemming the general tide of free-wheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights that were not rooted in the nation's history and tradition."

As an example, he cited the 1997 decision in Washington v. Glucksberg, which rejected a right to die for those who are terminally ill.

Turning to religion, Kavanaugh said Rehnquist had maintained that the "wall of separation between church and state" was a misleading metaphor "based on bad history."

Thomas Jefferson as president used this phrase in a letter in 1802 to describe the First Amendment's twin clauses - one banning an "establishment of religion" and the other protecting the "free exercise" of religion. The Supreme Court adopted the metaphor in a 1947 opinion.

Scholars and judges have continued to disagree over whether the Constitution should be interpreted to forbid religious symbols on government property or religious invocations at government meetings.

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Credit: By David G. Savage - Washington Bureau - [email protected]

Caption: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Wednesday.

Rehnquist

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP