Strict Scrutiny - Supreme Ambition

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Melissa, Kate, and Leah sit down with Ruth Marcus, the author of Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky

Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Hello, and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We're your hosts. I'm Leah Littman. I'm Melissa Murray. And I'm Kate Shaw. We are delighted to bring you a very special episode of Strict Scrutiny today

with none other than Ruth Marcus, a columnist at the Washington Post and the author of, drumroll, Supreme Ambition, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Conservative Takeover. Now that the Roberts Court may give way to the Thomas Court and the Chief Justice may be losing control over his conservative majority, we thought our listeners might be interested in hearing from the author of the book that really described the ascension of Brett Kavanaugh to the court and the various actors involved in his whole rise to power. So Ruth, welcome to the pod. I am delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. We're delighted to have you. This book is so dishy. My eyes are like saucers and I'm so

excited to just dig right in. So Leah, I know you have lots of questions, so I'm going to let you have the first pass at this. Okay, so why don't we just start at the beginning? So the book opens with Justice Kavanaugh's omission from the initial Trump list of possible Supreme Court nominees. And it has an anecdote about how Trump threw out the possibility of asking the Federalist Society for some help in creating a list of possible Supreme Court nominees. So I guess, how did Trump know to think of the Federalist Society? And could you tell us about the person that would put him in touch with Federalist Society, Chris Christie? Because I just found this entire thing super fascinating. Well, there's a guy that you might not have heard of, you three, named Leonard Leo.

Very vaguely familiar. The worst LL. Yes, the other LL. Bad LL. Okay, so Trump doesn't know from judges, as you know, but he did understand early on that he had a problem with evangelicals and he was running against Chris Christie. And even back then, Chris Christie from my hometown of Livingston, New Jersey, said to him, how are you going to deal with the evangelicals? And Trump said, I don't know. What do you think I should do? And Christie, smart guy, said Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. So when it came to pass, astonishingly enough, that Trump was on the cusp of getting the nomination, a meeting was set up by Don McGahn in his offices at Jones Day with one Leonard Leo who came bearing a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. And Trump had this idea, which was simultaneously crazy, disruptive, unprecedented,

and as it turned out, really quite brilliant to not just assemble this list, but to make it public in order to reinforce his bona fides, such as they were among evangelicals, who were super, as you know, and with very good reason, very nervous about this thrice divorced, once democratic, God knows what he really thought about abortion nominee. And he put out this list, which was a very far right list. And there is at least one, and if you're Brett Kavanaugh, very much one notable omission, which is Brett Kavanaugh. And honestly, at the time, if you were Brett Kavanaugh, it wasn't the biggest tragedy in the world because he didn't think and possibly none of us thought that Trump was going to actually get elected. But once Trump did get elected, it became a big problem and it became a very important mission for the Kavanaugh allies and acolytes to fix, including Don McGahn, to fix that problem. So we want to ask about that sustained campaign to fix it, but maybe first let's talk about the omission in the first place. So you talk about, you know, some concerns that seem to have led to the omission of Kavanaugh

from Leo's initial list, you know, basically in the vein of he wasn't conservative enough, right? There were a couple of opinions on the D.C. Circuit that led really hardline conservative activists to fear, again, for sort of the metal, the conservative metal that Kavanaugh really possessed. So what were those concerns? Well, they really boiled down to, in the words of Mike Davis, who was Chuck Grassley's chief nominations clerk, and he was a fascinating... Oh, I'm going to have some questions about Mike Davis later. Don't worry. He was a fascinating behind the scenes figure to try to deny Brett Kavanaugh the nomination.

But then he became his staunchest advocate. But Mike Davis used to talk about Brett Kavanaugh as too bushy, meaning George W. Bush, too swampy, meaning us here in Washington, and to Chiefy, meaning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. I love it when conservatives eat their young. Yes, it was, that actually was my totally favorite part of researching and writing the book, and just the juiciest. I think these were entirely legitimate worries among the super conservatives about Brett Kavanaugh. He is a person who really liked and actually continues to like to straddle both worlds. He liked to teach at Yale and Harvard. He liked to have very good friends, and he did have very good friends on the left. He could live comfortably

in both worlds. And a theme of the book and a theme of my writings about Brett Kavanaugh is that he really likes to be liked. And this is not, for example, a problem that Justice Thomas has. Justice Thomas likes to say what he thinks. And he's alone in saying it that's totally fine Justice Kavanaugh likes to find ways to split the difference and the folks who were assembling this list and looking at who might be a good Trump justice

didn't want a mediator type like Brett Kavanaugh to be on the list and further, I don't know if you guys recall this, haha, but Donald Trump had just finished running against one Jeb Bush, and he was not happy with anybody close to any Bushes. So there was both a kind of high level ideological concern about Kavanaugh and a typical Trumpian, you're not on my team, you're on the other guy's team, so I don't like you concern. So he was off the list for a good

time. So there's the Bushy concerns. There's a kind of, you know, characterological, he's, you know, conciliatory. Maybe that will cash out in terms of moderation and opinions. And I think there were a couple of D.C. Circuit opinions that were pointed to specifically, right, one on the Affordable Care Act, right, a decision he wrote, not even, you know, saying anything nice about the ACA, but basically finding that the ACA, its constitutionality could not be reached because a statute called the Tax Injunction Act made it premature, right, to reach the merits of the constitutionality of the ACA. And then another opinion that seemed to suggest some sympathy for the idea that there was a compelling government interest in facilitating access to contraception, right?

So those two things seemed, in addition to these other factors that you mentioned, to be tilting very sense that Kavanaugh, if there's a kind of procedural out that'll allow him to avoid deciding a hard question, for better or worse, will often try to take that. I thought, frankly, the argument that he had been squishy on the contraceptive abortion case was ridiculous. But it just showed the importance of to the advocates on that side of making sure they weren't gonna have not just another suitor, but another O'Connor. Yeah, I had the same reaction to the kind of character issue, because I think what the conservative critics didn't understand was that his cultivation of friends on the left was a way of making his views seem more moderate because you had pieces by someone like Lisa Blatt who would say,

I'm a self-identified liberal and I favor Roe versus Wade and I still support Brett Kavanaugh's nomination because we're friends. And that kind of mitigated the effort to cast his views as out of the mainstream or as concerning, you know, or as having these potentially deleterious consequences. I think that's part of it too. But I also think part of what Ruth is getting at and what I think came across really strongly in the book is that Brett Kavanaugh doesn't actually have any deep rooted convictions. He's sort of like, I'll go where you want me to go. And that sort of came out in a lot of ways. He becomes more conservative because that's what's warranted in the moment. And earlier in his career,

where more moderation was needed, he did that too. I mean, he is almost a kind of cipher. So that's a really fascinating point. I think one of the things that we. I mean, he is almost a kind of cipher. So that's a really fascinating point. I think one of the things that we didn't understand that certainly I didn't understand about Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated was how his ideological and political views were formed. Because this was not one of the, this was not Neil Gorsuch, right? Who was smoking a pipe and channeling William F. Buckley when he was in high school with Brent Kavanaugh. Those pictures are amazing.

It's so precious. Oh, I listened to the book. So there's pictures? Not in the book, but I'll send them to you. She talks about Neil Gorsuch in his Georgetown Prep senior year picture has a photo of him smoking a pipe and reading from William F. Buckley's Up from Liberalism. Like, you're 17, sir. Hello.

Oh, my God. And when I was going back through old copies of the Yale Daily News to get a sense of what the life was like on campus in 1982, three, four, when Kavanaugh was an undergraduate there, you would run across familiar names writing opinions, op-eds for the Yale Daily News. Not Brett Kavanaugh. We know what he was doing there. He was in Deke. He was drinking a lot. He was hanging out with the varsity jocks that he couldn't be a part of. Even in law school, even during his first year of law school, when the Bork nomination, and you may recall that Judge Bork was a professor at Yale Law School, was roiling America, and one would think roiling the campus, nobody really remembers Brett Kavanaugh. They kind of, as saying anything about that, expressing any views on that, there was a kind of vague sense that

he was a Republican, but not like one of those Republicans. He was a member of the Federalist Society. But for example, when I talked to George Priest, who was recalling him and explaining how he helped him get the Kaczynski clerkship, Priest was like, really? He was a member of the Federalist Society? I didn't remember that. So it wasn't until really, he clerks for a very moderate Republican judge, Walter Stapleton on the Third Circuit. But then he gets the Kaczynski clerkship, and then he gets the gig with the SG's office, and then he gets the Kennedy clerkship, and then he goes to Ken Starr. And that seems to be the moment where the partisanship, the partisanship that we all saw at the hearing, really erupted.

Yeah. So can we step back and go through parts of that story? Because you brought up, you know, George Priest and helping him get the Kaczynski clerkship. And maybe we can just go there, because I think this is part of the book where several of us had questions. So you tell this story about how he got the clerkship with then Judge Alex Kaczynski on the Ninth Circuit, and how that really jumpstarted his career. And the way he got that clerkship is, I think, worth spelling out for those who haven't read the book, which, you know, you should all do, and then maybe we can have a conversation about it. So you note that Kavanaugh was contacted by a former professor, George Priest, who was trying to help Kaczynski find a replacement law

clerk. And this professor had, quote, never had Kavanaugh in a law class, but met him at the gymnasium where he had recruited Kavanaugh to play on his intramural basketball team. And you want to know why women do not get clerkships in the same number as men. So this is like the butterflies wing story to beat all butterflies wing story. If Alex Azar, who later went on to be a number of other things, had not left under circumstances that I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out, but still remain mysterious, had not suddenly left the Kaczynski clerkship, we would 100% not have Justice Brett Kavanaugh. No question about it. What happened was this. Kavanaugh had taken a

George Priest class. It was some really obscure, like, trusts and estatesy or something like that class. But when I called Priest, he told me he didn't really remember him in the class particularly much. What he remembered was, to your point, Melissa, this was a really good guy on the basketball court and quote, you can tell a lot about people by the way they play basketball. And he thought that this was, my husband says this is true, but you know, you can tell what, and he says he plays with women also. But in any event, you can tell a lot about people from the way they play basketball. And this was a chambers that was in some degree of trouble. So Brett Kavanaugh, George Priest thought would be a good calming influence on these chambers. So Priest calls up Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh thinks about it overnight. He's on his way to Williams and Connolly, a fine, fine

Washington law firm, where I'm sure he would have had a very lovely and lucrative career. But instead, he ups and drives across the country to California, and the rest is history for better or worse. Let's just stop and pause and ruminate on that for a moment. So Brett Kavanaugh's jump shot is the healing power that is needed to mend the disruption and rupture of the Kaczynski chambers. Maybe he passed a lot. This is why, I mean, and I think you were right. I think your husband's right, Ruth, that you probably can tell a lot about a person by the way they play basketball, but probably not the things that matter in a clerk necessarily, or not all of them.

You might want to have, in addition to the basketball and the sportsmanship, I guess, to know something about this person's legal acumen. I just, I find this like so old boysy and clubby and just really, really gross. One reason I find it gross, well, I'm going to note one and then just make a caveat. And the note is, of all of the justices who have their credentials and intellect questioned, right, it's not the one who got their start through a clerkship because they were a good intramural basketball player. Cum laude graduate when the person who gets assailed all the time is actually a summa

cum laude graduate. The summa graduate, by the way, would be Justice Sotomayor, just so we're all clear here. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Brett Kavanaugh got into Yale Law School. You say his classmates in college felt the same way, right? Everyone was pretty satisfied. His classmates in college felt the same way. He graduated cum laude, as you say. Was he playing intramural basketball with the Yale Law Dean of Admissions?

No. Can't tell. This could be the sequel. There was no impressive set of extracurricular activities. There was nothing. And honestly, when there was a meeting at Yale Law School for people who were interested in clerking at the Supreme Court, and when Brett Kavanaugh turned up at this meeting, people were like, really? He thinks so? And he got an interview with Justice Rehnquist and didn't get the Rehnquist clerkship.

But you may be now surmising why I titled the book Supreme Ambition. Because this guy who had not just this ambition kind of simmered and simmered and simmered. And then kind of after the at the time of or right before the Kennedy clerkship just really exploded. And a friend of mine did mention that no one who's on the Supreme Court is really without ambition, you kind of don't get there without that, unless you're maybe David Souter. But I'm still sticking by the title. Yeah, no, definitely. I did just want to do the one flag about the thing we're not going to talk about, which is the book discusses the kind of intra-conservative memorandum about whether Justice Kavanaugh knew anything about Judge Kaczynski's sexual misconduct, you know, for which Judge Kaczynski would later resign. And, you know, that is kind of its own separate issue. But it seems like he's just kind of a regular guy who happens to be in the right place

at the right time and is affable and gets the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again. I think it's that plus something else. He's a pretty smart guy who is in the right place at the right time, time after time. But also, and this goes to your point, Melissa, has an incredible knack of finding older men who take him under their wing and really, really promote him. So the first was Ken Starr. Judge Starr, Ken Starr really loved Brett Kavanaugh. The second was George W. Bush. And that makes total sense, right? They hung out together a lot And they could talk a lot of sports and it was the ultimate guy thing going on. And George W. Bush just went to the mat again and again and again to make sure that Brett Kavanaugh got confirmed to the D.C. Circuit. And then last and definitely not least, and this goes to the opening chapter of the book, was Justice Kennedy, who loved Brett Kavanaugh. He would say to his clerks, this is the chair Brett sat in.

And Justice Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths, as I report behind the scenes, to convince President Trump to get Brett Kavanaugh's name on that list finally, and to basically suggest that if Kavanaugh were on the list, it might be a factor in his decision making about whether or not to leave the court. So let's come back to this, because this is obviously definitely worth talking about. But I did want to just have one more beat on this Justice Kavanaugh's knack for acquiring male mentors, which is, can you imagine, let's say, a woman of a similar age, right, being able to advance herself in this same way that Justice Kavanaugh did, namely just acquiring like male older mentor after male older mentor after another

and just building this kind of rapport with them and becoming, you know, buddy-buddy and then advancing because they find you like personally charming. Leah, is that actually a question? Narrator voice. Thank you. Anyways, more of an observation. There's reporting in the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, Ruth, but I think for the first time,

you break some news about Kavanaugh's role as a Third Circuit clerk, right? Because he did two court of appeals clerkships. First, he clerks on the Third Circuit for a judge who's not like a feeder judge to the Supreme Court. And as you were saying, was on his way to private practice, and then the Kaczynski clerkship really fortuitously for Kavanaugh arose, but that he worked on the Third Circuit opinion in Planned Parenthood versus Casey during the year that he was a law clerk, and that was something that I had not known about. And one of the other judges on the panel that Justice Kavanaugh's judge, Walter Stapleton, was on the panel with was none other than recently appointed Third Circuit judge and strict scrutiny fanboy, Samuel Alito. Small world. Samuel Alito, if I'm recalling correctly, did believe that one part of the law, which was the spousal consent part, was perfectly constitutional because why not? Oh, and that was the part of the law that Justice O'Connor, who Alito replaced,

had the most issues with, which was interesting. I mean, she did not have a problem with the parental notification or the waiting period parts, but she did have a problem with the spousal notification period, in part because it seemed like a dignitary slight to women to be forced to go to their husbands in order to exercise this right. Yeah. And Judge Stapleton, in the majority opinion, that was one that Brett Kavanaugh worked on, because I called Judge Stapleton up and congratulated him on having gotten it right in the opinion. He said, yeah, Brett and I did a good job on that. So that was I thought that was confirmation. And I had known from elsewhere.

And so they did actually do a pretty good job of anticipating where the Supreme Court was going to come out. But why didn't that come out in the confirmation? I mean, people were looking for tea leaves about what Judge, now Justice Kavanaugh, would do on abortion. I would imagine working on Casey is much more predictive than what he did in Garza versus Hargan, which was the Jane Doe undocumented teenager abortion case. Well, so the answer, Melissa, is that it takes a long time to do this reporting. As you know, these things get super rushed through and there wasn't enough reporting on it. And also, while that means a lot to the people who are talking here and to many of your listeners, it's a very, very subtle point. And, you know, Supreme Court confirmation hearings are not about subtle points. I actually imagine it, Supreme Court confirmation hearings are not about subtle

points. I actually imagine it would have been quite comforting to people who were on the fence, like Elisa Murkowski or Susan Collins, to know that he had sort of presaged what the court ultimately did in Casey and was not as the conservatives were sort of painting him in their own internecine struggles as someone who was going to be staunchly against abortion rights. I mean, so it's not clear how it would have cut. Yeah, no, I totally agree. So maybe now we can just ask about the Justice Kennedy involvement, because in the book, you know, you say Justice Kennedy had lobbied to get Brett Kavanaugh on the president's list and then recommended him as a successor to President Trump when they were actually discussing his retirement. And

I guess, when did this start? Like, how did those overtures happen? Through what channels? And like, what were people's reactions to this as it was happening? Was anyone kind of like, this seems a little, a little skeezy? This is the Trump White House. So, no. I mean, clear ethical lines and separations that are appropriate were not really top of list. Trump loved getting justices and openings, as you know. The Gorsuch thing was

central casting, and he loved it, and he loved it, and he really wanted another one. In fact, he kept going around and saying, I think I'm going to get five. I think I'm going to get five, like they were baseball cards or something. And so it was actually on the sparkling spring morning that Justice Gorsuch was confirmed that Justice Kennedy was there to swear in his former sort of clerk. And also does not get a lot of press mention that he was a sort of clerk. Yeah. And that's a technical term, right? Or that he graduated also cum laude. You know, again, like not that this is all about like academic rankings, yada, yada, yada.

But the point is, is the justices whose intellect and credentials get questioned are not the ones with the less shiny resume. And, you know, I just have an aside about that, which is I think it's even more insidious than that, because honestly, whatever people say about Justice Kagan, they're not questioning her credentials and resume and intellect. It is very Justice Sotomayor based. And, you know, why is one of those things not like the other? So Justice Kennedy anyway, asks McGahn if he can have a little bit of time alone with the president. Answer, yes. And they go in and they talk and they say, and basically Kennedy's message is, there's someone who's not on your list who should be and it's Brett Kavanaugh. And guess what happens the next November, right before the Federalist Society annual meeting? Ta-da! Brett Kavanaugh on a new list that also includes, by the way, Amy Coney Barrett,

newly named to the Seventh Circuit. And there is a lot of, I guess, street fighting among the conservatives over the two of them, especially when Justice Kennedy decides to step down and that seat becomes available. And Justice Kavanaugh comes out on top in large part because Don McGahn is such a dogged advocate on him. So can you talk a little bit about this? And this part was actually, again, super gossipy and great because I did not realize how much strife there was within the different factions of the White House between McGahn and Jared and Ivanka. And so like Brett Kavanaugh just basically became a bone between these two camps of dogs within the Trump White House fighting over the seat? Well, there were pre-existing hostilities. It was like the Balkans. And so if you were for

Brett Kavanaugh, I would be for Amy Coney Barrett just because I don't like you. So there was that set of hostilities that was internecine hostilities that were going on inside the White House. So you're saying these people were not deciding whether to support justices based on who was the best originalist or textualist? I would say there was, I think it's fair to say there was less reading of opinions in the, inside the West. Less reading. Less reading in end of sentence. Also less reading of opinions than in previous determinations. But while that was playing out inside the White House, outside the White House, there was this very fierce ideological and not entirely irrational fight between the true believer conservatives and the more establishment conservatives between those who wanted to have a pitched all out fight because they didn't want

any more suitors and those who thought that the most important thing was to be able to count to 50 or 51. And, you know, there was also a fight that McGahn was a part of between those who believed that the most important thing was to pick somebody who you knew would overrule Roe or be at least skeptical about marriage equality and things like that, and those whose real passion in life was deconstructing the administrative state. And so there were three different, or maybe two and a half different fights going on. And there were just really active players in each of these camps. I just, you know, reading the book, I was like, is it normal to have this kind of a sustained outside lobbying campaign in favor of multiple candidates? I mean, obviously, there's like stories that we're familiar with about Marty Ginsburg campaigning really hard for RBG in the Clinton years, but I just couldn't call to mind any example of anything like this ever occurring around a Supreme Court vacancy. Was this totally new? I think there are precedents in the Marty Ginsburg example, but the Marty Ginsburg example was so notable because these things are usually done in more subtle ways.

Look, there's always people who are angling for one person or another. What was, I thought, most notable here was the anti-Kavanaugh campaign and how intense it was. Yeah, it got really vicious. And then, of course, Kavanaugh himself was not a passive bystander in any of this, right? So he arguably really makes a play for himself through the opinions that he authors while he was a sitting judge in the D.C. Circuit, including the opinion that Melissa alluded to earlier in Garza versus Hargan and a separate writing in an administrative law case in which he sort of gratuitously says that Humphrey's executor, this case that blesses the existence of independent agencies with some insularity from presidential control. He sort of goes out of his way to say that was basically wrong and should be confined to its facts. So he's not standing idly by, right? He's making a profile for himself and making the case that he should be elevated in what is a quite political way through these writings. The use of the word auditioning when I heard it from those in and around the D.C.

Circuit, was really quite extraordinary. It's not unheard of at all. In fact, there were some Brett Kavanaugh emails from his time in the counsel's office where he was watching some of his predecessor auditioners. I think it was Judge Wilkinson, J. Harvey Wilkinson and Judge Lutiga on the Fourth Circuit then, who were trying to elbow out each other for some good press. The thing that was interesting about the Garza abortion case was that it wasn't entirely clear to me that this was a sort of Benny that dropped in Brett Kavanaugh's lap. In other words, if you know that your goal is to get selected by Donald Trump and

get yourself onto the Supreme Court, having in, I think it was came up in December right after his name got onto the list. Having that case drop into your, having you be on the panel in that case is not necessarily a good thing because that this young woman is not entitled to get relief? And you're going to tell her to jump through more weeks of hoops when her pregnancy is increasing by the week, as pregnancies tend to do. But if you're a conservative anti-abortion activist, you're going to read that and say, hey, why didn't you go as far as your colleague over there and start to use some language about abortion and say it's not at all clear that refugees have rights protected under the Constitution to have abortions. So it was that one I thought was a little bit of a lose-lose for him. Although he handled it in a very crafty way, right? As you say, like he dropped some of these rhetorical signals, like the use of abortion on

demand. Yes. And yet craft something of a compromise solution, which is not at all like a humane or reasonable compromise and not indeed one that anyone was asking for, which is just make this young woman wait longer and jump through more hoops, but not to definitively say, you know, she has no constitutional entitlement here. But I think that it was in the end actually a very crafty move because it allowed like a Susan Collins to say, look, he didn't go out of his way to say something categorically hostile to abortion and Roe and Casey. And yet functionally what he was saying was, you know, delay and just sort of, if she's out of luck, she's out of luck. One of my favorite descriptions in the book was actually something you got from his former colleagues on the DC circuit who described him as, quote, a good colleague, except in cases where it mattered.

Which, you know, just kind of, you know, called to mind what we were talking about earlier, namely this person who really, like to be liked and cultivates this particular persona and yet like is not actually compromising. He's a great doctor, except for surgeries. So you've already alluded to some of this, but there was also this organized campaign of former law clerks of Justice Kavanaugh pushing really hard on Leo and other people to get him on the list and then later to get him selected as the nominee. So can you talk a little bit about this? Because this was fascinating to me, again, because it seemed much more highly organized than anything that I have ever heard about or read about before, there was this war room, there were people acting as kind of surrogates, you know, appearing on basically any news outlets that would take them. And again, like being quite vicious and dismissive about like other possible nominees as well.

I think you have to distinguish between the before nomination effort and the after nomination effort. In the before nomination effort there, and even before getting on the list effort, there was a lot of effort to get Leonard Leo on board. So there was a delegation of Kavanaugh clerks that went to see Leonard Leo in his Federalist Society office, where I think the placard says something like, I'm the boss here. Like, hello, we knew that. And then afterwards, I think there was, you have to understand about Brett Kavanaugh, that he had been on the other side of these confirmation fights. So more than any nominee in the history of confirmations, just Kagan a little bit, he understood what it took. He knew how important it was for his initial statement to hit all the right notes. He knew that you needed to create these coalitions and advocate.

And he had a hard time, to some extent, leaving it to Don McGahn. So there was both a White House effort, such as White House efforts were, but Don McGahn kept a lot of that centralized in Don McGahn, the person he trusted most. And so meanwhile, there was this Kavanaugh war room, former clerks, his friend Joel Kaplan, who's a top official at Facebook in Washington, who was helping him behind the scenes. So it takes a village to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Can we talk a little bit about the confirmation battle? Battle, I think, is not too strong a term for it, but even before the battle, it becomes clear to some component of this conservative cadre that he is actually a

movement conservative. I guess I want to know how he got that way, because it does seem like he is a bit of, I don't know, flip-flopper for much of his life. And then I think, as you said earlier, there is this catalyzing moment when he comes into the orbit of Ken Starr. So can you say a little bit about that moment and then how it then translates into the confirmation hearings and where we really sort of see the conservative bona fides being displayed to the world. Right. So you said earlier, Melissa, that you didn't think he had kind of fundamental beliefs. And that might be a little bit strong. Yeah, I will walk that back for sure. Yeah, and I think he does have fundamental beliefs, but they're not.

I think that this is a good thing, not a bad thing, that they're not so fundamental. He's not capable of having friends with opposite views, but they weren't sort of foundational. He did not grow up in a house, even though his father was an inside the beltway lobbyist, where people talked about legislation or public policy or politics. He grew up in a house where people talked about sports and people in the neighborhood and church. That was, I mean, it might as well have been in Indianapolis as in Bethesda. And so the degree to which his views awakened and deepened was very, very gradual, much, much more gradual than I would think most people on the Supreme Court who probably have an understanding of and views on politics earlier than the norm. But it really came to a head in the Ken Starr investigation and with the Clintons. And there you have both from the documents that were available and that became available at the time.

And I'd love to talk about the document problem with Brett Kavanaugh because that was a really big outrage. But both from the documents that became available and from reporting that I did among his colleagues, both his colleagues in Starr's office, but more important, people who knew him in and about that time, the venom that we saw to the Clintons during that outburst, during his hearings, was not unique. He became convinced, and I understand this because I had the frustration of covering the Clinton presidency during this time, and there was a lot of truth shading and alighting of answering, but he just became convinced that they were liars and almost had a Javert-like desire to go after them. And that animus, I think, combined with his affection for and fervor for George W. Bush really set him on this conservative course.

So that is such an interesting story. And I think for a lot of conservatives, you know, hatred of the Clintons grew out of a perception that, you know, they were this powerful Democratic team at the helm in Washington. But it almost sounds as though for Kavanaugh, hatred of the Clintons then propelled him into embracing more conservative politics in this really fascinating way that you actually really saw come out in the hearing, which we should turn to. Maybe let's pivot to that now. So the hearing. Let me try telling one story first, because it's so compelling. And, you know, it was hatred of the Clintons and just wrapped up in a, this just became such a route to success. And once you signed onto this team, it looked like clear sailing. And early on, it was actually during

the time, during or right after he was working for Starr in the independent counsel's office, that he started to talk to people about being on the Supreme Court someday. Yet at the same time, there's a story I tell in the book about a USA who he set up on a date with. He doesn't know her. It's a blind date. And she's a Democrat. And he probably knows that. And he starts talking to her about the Clintons and what liars they are. And she told me this story on the record, and it was striking to her at the time. I mean, you guys know what prosecutors are supposed to do. They're really actually not supposed to talk to outsiders or even insiders about how much they really loathe the targets of their investigation. He doesn't have a lot of game on the dating scene.

So that's one, I think, that you could glean from this anecdote. But I think the other thing that comes through in this period of his life where he's in the orbit of Ken Starr and then later goes to the Bushes is that his antipathy for the Clintons is really matched by his love of George W. Bush. And he's really embraced by the Bush White House. He marries Bush's personnel secretary, who, as you know, it is something of a surrogate daughter to former President Bush and his wife, Laura. And then when he is nominated and there is this avalanche of

documents that have to be disclosed because of all of the time that he spent in public service, they're not sure they're going to be able to disclose everything in time from the National Archives. And former President Bush steps in to say he will put together a coalition of the willing to pay for the disclosure of this avalanche of documents to keep the nomination on track. We did get actually a lot of disclosure. I had a great time wallowing in these documents, but it was an outrage how much was kept from the committee and how willing the committee Republicans were to collude in this effort to keep potentially relevant material out, how unable the committee Democrats led by Dianne Feinstein, another subject of discussion, unable they were to convey the outrage of this material, how brazen Bill Burke and others were

in saying, oh, well, we can't let this out because that's protected by constitutional privilege. What you may ask is constitutional privilege. Don't know. We just said it's protected. Nobody looked at it to make sure it was right. Someday we'll see this stuff, but it's not someday soon. So this was even before we got to the unpleasantness, a hearing that was less than what a confirmation hearing should be and a review should be. You say generally, but I think it's true about this episode, the Democrats were dealt a bad hand and played it badly. So I think that comes through at a number of different points in the narrative. So maybe let's turn now to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her accusations and how

the members of both the House and the Senate who initially received those allegations responded and just sort of, you know, Feinstein, maybe since you brought up, let's talk about Feinstein specifically, sort of how did she find out about Blasey Ford? How did she respond? So Christine Blasey Ford is just a fascinating fascinating person who I think is one of the most guileless and to some extent naive people I ever met. And she had been carrying around this knowledge, had not gone public with it when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the DC Circuit, had known that the Supreme Court situation was a possibility. And she kind of had this notion that maybe if she just called up Don McGahn and said, hey, there's a Brett Kavanaugh problem, that it could all possibly just go away

because no one would want to have somebody like that on the Supreme Court. Ha ha ha. And then she spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get her information to the right people. And she called her congresswoman and prepared a letter for her. The congresswoman called Dianne Feinstein at home on a Saturday and said, I have this information. I have this constituent. This is what she says happened. And Senator Feinstein says to her, oh, that's serious. Have her write me a letter. And time passes, a few weeks pass, but a few weeks make an enormous difference in this situation. And in the interim, by the way, Senator Feinstein does not mention this, does not mention this to her chief counsel at the time, like, hey, we've got something going on.

Even after the letter comes in, does not mention it to her colleagues on the Judiciary Committee. As Christine Blasey Ford is going back and forth and back and forth over the summer, stands basically silent while Christine Blasey Ford is making her decision. And it was watching a play that played itself out as if the previous chapter or the sequel to this play had never happened. By which I mean, this is the way maybe you might have handled this if you hadn't been around as Dianne Feinstein was for Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. Anybody who was there and I covered those hearings. I didn't just cover those hearings. Yes, that's how I met my husband. Sweet Washington story. Anybody who's around for those hearings would have known when something like this comes in, it's going to leak. It's just a question of when. And Dianne Feinstein just took it on herself instead of sharing it with, say, Dick Durbin, who's the whip

and the other senior Democrat on the committee, not to deal with it until, of course, it did leak at precisely the worst possible moment, really for everybody. One of the most gut-wrenching things for me was to read Ricky Seidman's words and advice where, you know, she said, you know, she learned of these allegations, you know, around the time that they were getting out and leaking. And she said, you know, I didn't think it was going to affect the outcome, which of course, you know, she was proven right. But I also remember having this discussion with people at the time where like reasonably informed observers were so sure that like, of course,

the Republicans wouldn't want to jam through this nomination, you know, after these accusations came to light. But that I didn't think that I'm just saying, like, some people seriously thought that was the case. But instead, their strategy appears to have been no, like, what we're going to do is we're going to rile Brett Kavanaugh up about them, so that he gets really angry at the confirmation hearing because we think the tried and true and proven strategy is to like fight back and lash out about how this is all unfair and that's the way to deal with these allegations and you mentioned the mike davis character earlier he becomes this is you know chuck grassley's staffer he becomes, this is, you know, Chuck Grassley's staffer, he becomes involved in

preparing Brett Kavanaugh for his hearings. And he's just instigating him, instigating him, instigating him the night before so that when he goes to testify, Justice Kavanaugh is already pissed off. And we saw the outcome of that at his hearing where he lashes out against the Clintons, says those horrible things to Senator Globuchar, just, and that's what their strategy was, you know, make him angry. Yes. And that's the paradox of the whole thing. A piece of it was honestly, real raw Brett Kavanaugh. There is an anger thing going on there that, I mean, you can't summon that if you don't have it inside yourself. That's number one. Number two is he really did see this as an existential moment. It wasn't just whether he was going to get confirmed to the

Supreme Court seat that he had had ambitions for his whole life. It was whether he was going to be able to stay on the D.C. circuit, whether he was going to be able to get a fancy job at a law firm, which he had thought about doing if Hillary Clinton had been elected. So it was, you know, very fight or flight kind of thing. But it was also a tactic on the part of Mike Davis and on the part of Don McGahn, who understood that we are in a tribal situation here in Washington. And if you present this as tribal warfare, your tribe will rally around you. And so people thought that that Kavanaugh's performance that day was for the audience of Donald Trump. And I don't think that's entirely correct at all. It was actually even, of all things, for Susan Collins, who thought he went too far.

And after the Klobuchar outburst, sent word that he should dial it back. And so he did. That didn't just happen because Kavanaugh realized on his own that he had gone too far, though perhaps he did. She thought that he was too meek on the Fox interview as a Washington Post editorial board, to say a person who behaves like this cannot be on the Supreme Court was the very thing that assured he was going to be on the Supreme Court, because they all rallied around him. And of course, there were other allegations, you know, from Debbie Ramirez. We also are running short on time. And so we can't discuss one of my topics of obsession,

which is Zillow sleuthing and the, you know, alternative theory that gets presented on Twitter slash is packaged, you know, from different groups involved in this nomination process to be presented to the world as, you know, a way to basically plausibly deny, even though it's not so plausible, you know, that it was Brett Kavanaugh that assaulted Dr. Blasey Ford. And the other piece of the story that is in the book is about, I think thus far, and largely unknown person who had a similar story about Brett Kavanaugh to the allegations against him by Debbie Ramirez, namely that he had exposed himself to her while he was drunk in college. So do you want to just, you know, share with our listeners about that? So Washington being a small world,

Max Steyer is somebody who knew Brett Kavanaugh from their freshman year in college, litigated against Brett Kavanaugh when Max was at Williams and Connolly. Williams and Connolly was representing the Clintons, and Kavanaugh was at the independent counsel's office. By the way, this one's for you, Melissa. He plays basketball with my husband. So you can tell a lot about Max Dyer from the way he plays basketball. Is he a trick teller?

Yeah, Max. And I know him from his very important work on making the federal workforce better and ensuring better transitions. So Max Dyer recalled and desperately tried to get this information to the FBI and when he wasn't succeeding on that to the senators, recalled seeing a very similar episode to the one that Debbie Ramirez related about Brett Kavanaugh exposing himself to a woman at a drunken party their freshman year at Yale. He wasn't willing to go forward with this because he didn't want to put his organization at risk. It has a very bipartisan, nonpartisan reputation. But the FBI was outrageously, relentlessly uninterested in this. And I tell the story of Senator Chris Coons

desperately trying to get this information in the hands of Jeff Flake, in the hands of Susan Collins. And basically, they're not interested. They don't want to hear anymore. The FBI has done its investigation, and we should all stand down. And it's really a dereliction of duty, I think, on the part of the FBI and something that the Senate really needs to fix for the next time around. So Ruth, we are running out of time. And I guess I just want to know, there's always an origin story for these kinds of projects. What's the origin story for you behind Supreme Ambition? And what is your hope for this book in terms of informing dialogue, whether it's about the court or about this particular justice? What do you want us to take away from this? And what are the

lessons to be learned from everything that you cover in this book? Well, I have been writing about these confirmation battles for longer than I want to admit, since Judge Bork. So I covered Bork, I covered Thomas. I've known Brett Kavanaugh since he was working for Ken Starr. Quite frankly, I was relieved when President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh because I thought for a Trump nominee, he was pretty good. And so I just wanted to tell the story of who Brett Kavanaugh is, how this all happened. And within the context of the broader story of how the 3040 year battle to transform the court and the conservative takeover that we're witnessing the effects of and the triumph of now had occurred. So it was a kind of great story wrapped in an

important story. The other lesson, of course, is everyone should play intramural basketball if you attend law school. But don't throw elbows or be an asshole or you'll never get the appellate. Right. So thank you so much, Ruth, for joining us. Everyone should check out Ruth's book, Supreme Ambition. It is the perfect mix of law, hot gossip, and tea. So hopefully that will appeal to our listeners. Thanks as always to our producer, Melody Rowell. Thanks to Eddie Cooper for making our music.

And thanks again to Ruth for joining us. Thank you guys so much. So much fun.