Kavanaugh is remarkably unqualified for the Supreme Court

Matthew Yglesias touches on a really good point here. We have heard repeatedly that Brett Kavanaugh has an impressive resume and is "highly qualified" for the Supreme Court. I have heard it mostly from conservatives, but also quite a few liberals. But what is the basis for calling him "highly qualified"? I just don't see it in his record. I'm not just being partisan here. I could see Neil Gorsuch's qualifications even though I still opposed that nomination (mostly on the basis of his jurisprudence and the fact that he was placed in a stolen seat). But with Kavanaugh? He just seems more highly connected than highly qualified. Ygelsias does a good summary of his career:

Born into a privileged family that was well-connected in Republican Party politics, Kavanaugh coasted from Georgetown Prep, where he was apparently a hard partier, into Yale, where he joined the notoriously hard-partying secret society Truth & Courage, and then on to Yale Law School.

Soon after graduating, he got a gig working for independent counsel Ken Starr — a plum position for a Republican lawyer on the make because the Starr inquiry was supposed to take down the Clinton administration. Instead, it ended up an ignominious, embarrassing failure, generating an impeachment process that was so spectacularly misguided and unpopular that Democrats pulled off the nearly impossible feat of gaining seats during a midterm election when they controlled the White House.

Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski, an appeals court judge who was well known to the lay public for his witty opinions and well known to the legal community as a sexual harasser. When the sexual harassment became a matter of public embarrassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Kavanaugh professed to have simply not noticed anything amiss — including somehow not remembering Kozinski’s dirty jokes email distribution list.

Despite this inattention to detail, Kavanaugh ended up in the George W. Bush White House, playing a critical behind-the-scenes role as staff secretary to an administration that suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, let the perpetrator get away, invaded Iraq to halt the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and destroyed the global economy.

Kavanaugh then landed a seat on the DC Circuit Court, though to do so, he had to offer testimony that we now know to have been misleading regarding his role in both William Pryor’s nomination for a different federal judgeship and the handling of some emails stolen from Democratic Party committee staff. On the DC Circuit, he issued some normal GOP party-line rulings befitting his career as a Republican Party foot soldier.

Now he may end up as a Supreme Court justice despite never in his life having been involved in anything that was actually successful. He has never meaningfully taken responsibility for the substantive failures of the Starr inquiry or the Bush White House, where his tenure as staff secretary coincided with both Hurricane Katrina and failed Social Security privatization plan as well as the email shenanigans he misled Congress about, or for his personal failure as a bystander to Kozinski’s abuses.

The main reason that people think that Brett Kavanaugh is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is because proponents of the nomination keep saying that he is well-qualified. But nothing in his actual record makes him a legal superstar. Instead, whether we are talking about his time as a student, or working on the now-disgraced Starr investigation, or working for the failed Bush administration, or his lackluster recent years on the Court of Appeals, I am just not seeing a particularly talented individual, or any remarkable intellect. Instead, Kavanaugh's story seems to be the story of how in America privilege delivers. No matter what you do, if you are born into a privileged class, you will fall up throughout your career.

I submit this makes Kavanaugh particularly unqualified for the high court. He had many more opportunities to do great things that most and yet he didn't do anything great or even mildly remarkable.¹ There is nothing in Kavanaugh's history that suggest he should be on the most important court in the country.  And that is without considering the the other reasons to oppose his nomination (i.e. the perjury, the attempted rape, the gambling debts that were paid under mysterious circumstances, and the massive amounts of withheld records). Even if you push all that aside, Kavanaugh is a terrible nominee, eerie parallels to the history of privilege of our own "falling up" president.

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1-At least not remarkable in a good sense. His "investigation" of Vince Foster's death and what he put Foster's family through is remarkable in that other not-at-all-good way.