In a bizarre piece in the New Yorker which may be partially tongue-in-cheek, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe argues that Brett Kavanaugh’s college basketball reporting might be a sign that he’s unfit for the Supreme Court.
The upcoming edition of the New Yorker has a bizarre column about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s college sports reporting for his college student newspaper decades ago. The column, which is by Zach Helfand, features commentary from Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Tribe, who has also called for President Trump’s impeachment.
The column argues that there are several indicators in the 20-year-old Kavanaugh’s college sports reporting that indicate that he is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Tribe foolishly makes the case that Kavanaugh’s fascination with high-scoring players might be a sign that he has a “muscular view of executive power.”
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor who mentored Barack Obama, zeroed in on the lead sentence in Kavanaugh’s account of a midseason game against Cornell: “In basketball, as in few other team sports, it is possible for one person to completely dominate a game.” Was this a harmless observation? Tribe noted, “Kavanaugh’s seeming fascination with single-player domination might be a muscular view of executive power.” On the other hand, he found a departure from Kavanaugh’s typical jurisprudence in “Dartmouth Rally Upends Streak.” “Kavanaugh complained that the refs let the game ‘get completely out of control’ as Dartmouth players ‘consistently hammered’ a Yalie ‘without the whistle blowing’ once,” Tribe said. “One might see in that a rare early condemnation of judicial restraint.”
The column is intended to be a humorous poke at Kavanaugh’s past. However, it appears that the analysis of his college basketball reporting and is deadly serious. This is the kind of over-analysis that the left loves to mock when it is done by conservatives. If conservatives had analyzed Merrick Garland’s college artwork to determine his suitability for the Supreme Court, the left would have mocked it relentlessly.