The New York Times has acquired what they called “Committee confidential” emails withheld from Democrats that show Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh questioned the legal basis of Roe v. Wade and Affirmative Action.
According to one email dated 2003, “Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that ‘it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land,” the Times wrote.
The Times goes on to report that “Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: ‘I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.’”
According to the report, a White House spokesperson had no immediate comment on the disclosure of the secret files, but condemned the disclosure of “committee confidential” documents as a violation of Senate rules.
The report goes on to state that Kvanaugh also questioned Affirmative Action.
“The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside,” he wrote on a Department of Transportation case, adding he thought the then court’s four conservative justices at the time would probably “realize as much in short order and rule accordingly.”
You can read the whole report here.