Why was Brett Kavanaugh added to the Supreme Court List (and later nominated)?
Kavanaugh is, to my knowledge, to only candidate that has swamp origin; He is born and raised in Washington DC, went to Skull & Bones Yale Law School and worked for Skull & Bones George W. Bush.
Why would Donald Trump nominate a candidate that goes against his promise to drain the swamp?
WASHINGTON — When Donald J. Trump issued his final list of 21 potential nominees to the Supreme Court in September, he made a vow. “This list is definitive,” he said, “and I will choose only from it in picking future justices of the Supreme Court.”
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In important ways, Mr. Trump’s candidates represent a sharp break from the current conservative justices, who all went to law school at Harvard or Yale and who all served on federal appeals courts in the Northeast or in California.
If the list has a main theme, it is that there are plenty of good judges who went to law school at places like Notre Dame, Marquette, the University of Georgia and the University of Miami.
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Mr. Trump’s list has some striking omissions, among them Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Paul D. Clement, who was solicitor general from 2005 to 2008 and often argues cases before the Supreme Court.
Their perceived drawbacks say a lot about Mr. Trump’s priorities. Mr. Malcolm, who proposed both men for the list, drew some conclusions.
In Judge Kavanaugh’s case, it probably did not help that he went to Yale Law School and sits in Washington. “They may have wanted to send a message that they are an outside-the-Beltway organization,” Mr. Malcolm said. “And then the other part of it, not quite as severe, was his opinion in one of the Obamacare cases.”
Judge Kavanaugh dissented from a decision upholding the health care law, but he did so on jurisdictional grounds. Ideological purity would have required him to vote to strike down the law on constitutional grounds.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-justices.html