In the aforementioned Mother Jones profile, reporter Stephanie Mencimer also reminded readers that Kavanaugh is “a longtime active member of the Federalist Society” who, while in private practice, “filed a brief in a Supreme Court case supporting a New Mexico school district’s effort to maintain student-led prayers at football games” and defended the constitutionality of Florida’s “school voucher program that would direct public money to private religious schools.” As a judge, he has “made a name for himself as a staunch opponent of the Obama administration’s environmental agenda,” writing dissents “in cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency [that] often seemed to sway the Supreme Court,” and supporting “the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent a pregnant immigrant girl from obtaining an abortion,” she noted. Perhaps Kananaugh’s greatest error, in Mencimer’s view, is that he dissented from his colleagues’ decision to “uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act” — a decision that also provoked criticism from liberal pundit Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker.

As someone familiar with Kavanaugh’s record, I can confirm the far Left has reason to worry, but people devoted to the Constitution and the rule of law do not. His lengthy judicial record — spanning some 300 opinions over a dozen years — makes clear that he is truly committed to the constitutional principles of textualism and originalism. To cite just a few of his most notable opinions, Kavanaugh ruled against the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, upheld a Second Amendment challenge against a ban on semi-automatic rifles, struck down campaign spending limits on nonprofits that ran afoul of the First Amendment, and upheld prayer at government ceremonies. Similarly, he has held government agencies in check by limiting their administrative regulations to their actual statutory authority. His rulings prevented illegal immigrants from voting in union elections, and prevented the evasion of immigration visa laws by employers trying to replace Americans with foreign workers.