During the third day of the Senate confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee came under fire from abortion-rights groups for his discussion of the 2015 case Priests for Life v. HHS.
While questioning Kavanaugh, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) brought up the case, in which Priests for Life sued the federal government for relief from the Health and Human Services Department’s Obamacare mandate, which required that employers subsidize contraception — including Plan-B emergency contraception — for their employees.
In response to Cruz’s questioning, Kavanaugh described the argument of the plaintiff, Priests for Life: “They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objected to.”
Immediately, abortion-rights lobbying groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Center for Reproductive Rights pounced on Kavanaugh’s remark, accusing him of equating birth control with abortion-inducing drugs.
“Kavanaugh just referred to birth control as ‘abortion-inducing drugs,’ which is not only an anti-science lie, it’s an anti-choice extremist phrase that shows that our right to access both abortion and contraception would be in SERIOUS danger if he is confirmed,” NARAL tweeted.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, meanwhile, tweeted that his remark was “straight out of the anti-choice, anti-science phrase book used to restrict women’s access to essential health care.”
In a quote to HuffPost, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president Dawn Laguens accused Kavanaugh of pushing “anti-woman, anti-science propaganda.”
These shallow attacks on the nominee are evidence of how desperate left-wing groups are to twist the truth to stop Kavanaugh from being confirmed — but they’re also proof of how little they understand the role of a judge and the purpose of the law.
It was exceptionally obvious in the context of the hearing that Kavanaugh was not stating his opinion of the birth-control and emergency-contraception drugs in question; he was characterizing the position of Priests for Life, whose beliefs about contraceptives were the central issue in the case. It is crucial that a successful judge be able to do exactly what Kavanaugh did. If a judge is unable to accurately ascertain and characterize the argument of both sides, it will be impossible to determine which side has the better case.
Aside from being an inaccurate smear tactic, the effort to cast Kavanaugh’s reply as evidence of his “anti-science” beliefs undermines our ability to properly conceive of a judge’s role, and it diminishes people’s capacity to see the law as neutral.
If Kavanaugh can’t reiterate the position of the plaintiff in a case without being accused of pushing “anti-woman propaganda,” how can we view him as a neutral arbiter, obligated to comprehend and articulate the arguments of both sides in any given case?
These types of histrionics aren’t just unfair to a well-qualified, impartial justice; they’re destructive to our legal order.