Kavanaugh

WACO, Texas — Justice Brett Kavanaugh says the genius of the American system of government is that no one should have too much power, even as he and other conservatives on the Supreme Court are facing criticism for deferring repeatedly to President Trump.

Invoking the list of grievances against King George III that the nation’s founders included in the Declaration of Independence, Kavanaugh said Thursday the framers of the Constitution were set on avoiding the concentration of power.

“And the framers recognized in a way that I think is brilliant, that preserving liberty requires separating the power. No one person or group of people should have too much power in our system,” Kavanaugh said at an event honoring his onetime boss, Kenneth Starr, a former federal judge and solicitor general celebrated by conservatives who died in 2022.

Trump’s aggressive effort to remake the federal government did not come up inside a gymnasium on the campus of McLennan Community College in Waco.

Across the street from the event, though, several dozen protesters offered a different view of Kavanaugh and Trump.

“Basically, the Supreme Court has handed the country to Trump,” said J.W. LaStrape, the head of the Baylor University Democrats who was among the protesters.

“BK- Trump Flunky,” one banner said. “Shame on You. No One is Above the Law,” a placard read in a reference to the court’s 2024 decision, which Kavanaugh joined, that helped Trump avoid prosecution for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The court’s liberal justices also have objected to the conservatives’ repeated votes in favor of Trump’s emergency appeals to the Supreme Court, including the most decision this week to allow the resumption of sweeping immigration operations in Southern California.

Kavanaugh’s appearance in Waco highlighted Kavanaugh’s long history with Starr, most notably his stint as a prosecutor in Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Bill Clinton.

Starr became a household name in the late 1990s because of his investigation of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Kavanaugh pushed Starr to ask Clinton in graphic detail about phone sex and specific sexual acts, according to a 1998 memo.

“The President has disgraced his office, the legal system and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles – callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Starr followed Kavanaugh’s advice and his report, filled with the salacious details, was released in full by House Republicans, who ultimately impeached Clinton for lying under oath. The Senate acquitted him.

At a dinner honoring Starr a year later, Kavanaugh said Starr deserved a seat on the Supreme Court, though he acknowledged it was unlikely. Still, he called Starr a hero who did not let attacks dissuade him from doing what he thought was right.

“Be sorry for his critics because they were the ones who sacrificed law and principle for politics and expediency,” Kavanaugh said. “Ken Starr never did that.”

In 2018, Starr was among those who publicly defended Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee, as he faced sexual misconduct allegations, including from Christine Blasey Ford, who said he groped her at a party when they were teenagers and tried to remove her clothes.

Kavanaugh forcefully denied the allegations in an emotional statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, harking back to Starr’s investigation when he said “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” was part of the motivation for what he termed a “calculated and orchestrated political hit.”

Starr’s widow, Alice, introduced the justice Thursday, saying she was distraught when Kavanaugh’s character was called into question.

“Not one bit of negative press was true,” she said, adding that she was well familiar with such criticism from her husband’s time as independent counsel.

Ken Starr did varied work after the Whitewater investigation. He represented Jeffrey Epstein when the financier was first accused of having sex with underage girls. Epstein pleaded guilty to minor charges and accepted a light sentence in Florida in 2008, in a deal that avoided a more serious federal prosecution.

Starr served as dean of the Pepperdine University law school in the Los Angeles area and then as president of Baylor University, also in Waco. But he was forced out of the Baylor job in 2016 in the midst of a sexual assault scandal involving players on the school’s football team. A school-commissioned report found that under Starr’s leadership, Baylor did little to respond to the allegations.

Then in 2020, Starr joined Trump’s defense team that won Senate acquittal of the president after his first impeachment.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that U.S. Border Patrol agents violated the Constitution when they stopped a car on a freeway near San Clemente because its occupants appeared to be “of Mexican ancestry.”

The 4th Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches, the justices said then, and a motorist’s “Mexican appearance” does not justify stopping them to ask about their immigration status.

But the court sounded a decidedly different note on Monday when it ruled for the Trump administration and cleared the way for stopping and questioning Latinos who may be here illegally. By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside a Los Angeles judge’s temporary restraining order that barred agents from stopping people based in part on their race or apparent ethnicity.

“Apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. “However, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors.”

Critics of the ruling said it had opened the door for authorizing racial and ethnic bias.

UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham called it “shocking and appalling. I don’t know of any recent decision like this that authorized racial discrimination.”

Arulanantham noted that Kavanaugh’s writings speak for the justice alone, and that the full court did not explain its ruling on a case that came through its emergency docket.

By contrast, he and others pointed out that the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prohibited the use of race or ethnicity as a factor in college admissions.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote for a 6-3 majority in 2023. That decision struck down the affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

“Today, the Supreme Court took a step in a badly wrong direction,” Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor, wrote on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. “It makes no sense to conclude that racial and ethnic discrimination is generally unconstitutional, yet also that its use is ‘reasonable’ under the 4th Amendment.”

Reports had already emerged before the decision of ICE agents confronting U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents before they have been able to prove their status, compelling many to begin carrying documentation around at all times.

In New York on Monday, one man outside a federal court was pushed by ICE agents before being able to show them his identification. He was let go.

Asked by The Times to respond to increasing concern among U.S. citizens they could be swept up in expanded ICE raids as a result of the ruling, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that individuals should not be worried.

She added that immigration agents conduct targeted operations with the use of law enforcement intelligence.

“The Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s right to stop individuals in Los Angeles to briefly question them regarding their legal status, because the law allows this, and this has been the practice of the federal government for decades,” Leavitt said. “The Immigration and Nationality Act states that immigration officers can briefly stop an individual to question them about their immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States. And reasonable suspicion is not just based on race — it’s based on a totality of the circumstances.”

On X, the House Homeland Security Committee Democrats responded to Leavitt’s comments, writing: “ICE has jailed U.S. citizens. The Trump Admin is defending racial profiling. Nobody is safe when ‘looking Hispanic’ is treated as probable cause.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent pointed out that nearly half of the residents of Greater Los Angeles are Latino and can speak Spanish.

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed because of their looks, their accents, and the fact that they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

At issue in the case was the meaning of “reasonable suspicion.”

For decades, the court has said police and federal agents may stop and question someone if they see something specific that suggests they may be violating the law.

But the two sides disagreed over whether agents may stop people because they appear to be Latinos and work as day laborers, at car washes or other low-wage jobs.

President Trump’s lawyers as well as Kavanaugh said agents may make stops based on the “totality of the circumstances” and that may include where people work as well as their ethnicity. They also pointed to the data that suggests about 10% of the people in the Los Angeles area are illegally in the United States.

Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, said that the legal standard of reasonable suspicion “has a group of factors you must take into consideration,” adding, “racial profiling is not happening at all.”

It is a “false narrative being pushed,” Homan told MSNBC in an interview, praising the Supreme Court decision. “We don’t arrest somebody or detain somebody without reasonable suspicion.”

My dad’s passport is among his most valuable possessions, a document that not only establishes that he’s a U.S. citizen but holds the story of his life.

It states that he was born in Mexico in 1951 and is decorated with stamps from the regular trips he takes to his home state of Zacatecas. Its cover is worn but still strong, like its owner, a 74-year-old retired truck driver. It gives Lorenzo Arellano the ability to move across borders, a privilege he didn’t have when he entered the United States for the first time in the trunk of a Chevy as an 18-year-old.

The photo is classic Papi. Stern like old school Mexicans always look in portraits but with joyful eyes that reveal his happy-go-lucky attitude to life. He used to keep the passport in his underwear drawer to make sure he never misplaced it in the clutter of our home.

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, I told Papi to keep the passport on him at all times. Just because you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you’re safe, I told my dad, who favors places — car washes, hardware stores, street vendors, parks, parties — where immigrants congregate and no one cares who has legal status and who doesn’t.

“Exagera,” my dad replied — Trump exaggerates. As a citizen, my dad reasoned he now had rights. He didn’t have to worry like in the old days, when one shout of “¡La migra!” would send him running for the nearest exit of the carpet factory in Santa Ana where he worked back in the 1970s.

Then came Trump’s summer of deportation.

Masked migra swept across Southern California under the pretense of rounding up criminals. In reality, they grabbed anyone they thought looked suspicious, which in Southern California meant brown-skinned Latinos like my father. The feds even nabbed U.S. citizens or detained them for hours before releasing them with no apology. People who had the right to remain in this country were sent to out-of-state detention camps, where government officials made it as difficult as possible for frantic loved ones to find out where they were, let alone retrieve them.

This campaign of terror is why the ACLU and others filed a lawsuit in July arguing that la migra was practicing racial profiling in violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order. The Trump administration appealed, arguing to the Supreme Court that it needed to racially profile to find people to kick out of the country, otherwise “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed.

In a 6-3 vote, the justices lifted the temporary restraining order as the ACLU lawsuit proceeds. L.A.’s long, hot deportation summer will spill over to the fall and probably last as long as Trump wants it to. The decision effectively states that those of us with undocumented family and friends — a huge swath of Southern California and beyond — should watch over our shoulders, even if we’re in this country legally.

And even if you don’t know anyone without papers, watch out if you’re dark-skinned, speak English with an accent or wear guayaberas or huaraches. Might as well walk around in a T-shirt that says, “DEPORT ME, POR FAVOR.”

The ruling didn’t surprise me — the Supreme Court nowadays is a Trump-crafted rubber stamp for his authoritarian project. But what was especially galling was how out of touch Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion was with reality.

Kavanaugh describes what la migra has wrought on Southern California as “brief investigative stops,” which is like describing a totaled car as a “scratched-up vehicle.” A citizen or permanent resident stopped on suspicion of being in this country illegally “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote.

The justice uses the words “brief” or “briefly” eight times to describe what la migra does. Not once does he mention plaintiff Brian Gavidia, the U.S. citizen who on June 9 was at a Montebello tow yard when masked immigration agents shoved him against the fence and twisted his arm.

Gavidia’s offense? He stated he was an American three times but couldn’t remember the name of the East L.A. hospital where he was born. A friend recorded the encounter and posted it to social media. It quickly went viral and showed the world that citizenship won’t save you from Trump’s migra hammer.

Would Kavanaugh describe this as a “brief encounter” if it happened to him? To a non-Latino? After more cases like this inevitably happen, and more people are gobbled up by Trump’s anti-immigrant Leviathan?

Brian Gavidia stands in a parking lot next to East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park. A video of him having his arm twisted and held by an immigration officer against a wall despite being a U.S. citizen went viral. He’s currently a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging the Trump administration is violating the 4th Amendment with indiscriminate immigration raids.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Anyone who applauds this decision is sanctioning state-sponsored racism out of apartheid-era South Africa. They’re all right with Latinos who “look” a certain way or live in communities with large undocumented populations becoming second-class citizens, whether they just migrated here or can trace their heritage to before the Pilgrims.

I worry for U.S.-born family members who work construction and will undoubtedly face citizenship check-ins. For friends in the restaurant industry who might also become targets. For children in barrios who can now expect ICE and Border Patrol trucks to cruise past their schools searching for adults and even teens to detain — it’s already happened.

Life will irrevocably change for millions of Latinos in Southern California and beyond because of what the Supreme Court just ruled. Shame on Kavanaugh and the five other justices who sided with him for uncorking a deportation demon that will be hard to stop.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounts Gavidia’s travails in her dissent, adding that the Real ID he was able to show the agents after they roughed him that established his citizenship “was never returned” and mocking Kavanaugh’s repeated use of “brief.”

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

I will also dissent, but now I’m going to be more careful than ever. I’m going to carry my passport at all times, just in case I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even that is no guarantee la migra will leave me alone. It’s not a matter of if but when: I live in a majority Latino city, near a Latino supermarket on a street where the lingua franca is Spanish.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. I will be able to remain, no matter what may happen, because I’m a citizen. Imagine having to live in fear like this for the foreseeable future for those who aren’t?

There’s nothing “brief” about that.

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) apologized on Thursday for his impassioned comments about two Supreme Court justices, saying he “should not have used the words.”

Schumer derided Trump-appointed Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh on Wednesday as the Supreme Court heard arguments on a Louisiana law restricting abortion rights, saying they “will pay the price” if they side with the court’s conservatives on this case. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” he added.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Schumer said his words “didn’t come out the way I intended to.”

“My point was that there would be political consequences for President Trump and Senate Republicans if the Supreme Court, with the newly confirmed justices, stripped away a woman’s right to choose,” he said. He added: “I’m from Brooklyn. We speak in strong language.”

A clip of Schumer’s speech circulated on social media and was condemned by conservatives, including President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who on Thursday said the words “at the very best…were astonishingly reckless and irresponsible” and “clearly…dangerous.”

“It has almost been a century since the last time Democrats threatened to pack the Supreme Court because they wanted different rulings. History still judges that disgraceful episode to this day,” McConnell said. “So I would suggest that my Democratic colleagues spend less time trying to threaten impartial judges, and more time coming up with ideas that are actually constitutional.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare rebuke, saying Schumer’s comments were “not only inappropriate” but “dangerous.”

“All members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter,” Roberts said.

During court arguments on Wednesday, justices focused their questions on how specifically the Louisiana law would affect women and clinics that perform the procedure.

“I feel so deeply the anger of women all across America about Senate Republicans and the courts working hand in glove to take down Roe v. Wade,” Schumer told his Senate colleagues. “Republican state legislatures are restricting a woman’s right to choose so severely as to make it nonexistent, and the courts are now likely to go along because Senate Republicans have confirmed nominees they believe will strip away women’s rights and fundamentally change this country.

“I didn’t intend to suggest anything other than political and public opinion consequences for the Supreme Court,” he said, “and it is a gross distortion to imply otherwise.”

Reporting from Washington — Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday defended his broad view of gun rights and skepticism of federal regulatory agencies, but left uncertain his position on abortion and refused to detail his views on executive power, including whether a president can be ordered to answer questions in a criminal investigation.

Facing senators during a second day of his confirmation hearing that began in the morning and stretched well into the night, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee proved adept at giving lengthy answers without fully revealing his views on matters of controversy.

“You’re learning to filibuster,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told him when he steered around her question on whether the president is shielded from being investigated or questioned while in office.

As the evening wore on, none of the exchanges seemed to have changed the vote count in favor of Kavanaugh’s narrow confirmation. At only one point during the hearing — faced with questions about his knowledge of emails allegedly stolen from Democratic senators during the George W. Bush administration — did the otherwise well-prepared nominee appear flustered.

On presidential power, in particular, Kavanaugh seemed to come armed with a well-honed set of responses to questions about his previous writings.

In law review articles in 1998 and 2009, Kavanaugh said the president “should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office” and should not be subject to investigations or questioning. The “Constitution seems to dictate” that Congress, not a special prosecutor, should investigate a president for lawbreaking, he wrote.

But when pressed repeatedly by Democrats on Wednesday, Kavanaugh contended that he has never taken a position on whether the Constitution allows for indicting or investigating a sitting president for criminal wrongdoing. He did say a president could be tried and convicted after leaving office, whether at the end of a term or because of impeachment.

“I don’t think anyone thinks of immunity” for a president, he said.

The issue has taken on new significance because Trump is caught up in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and could be called to answer questions from a grand jury.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), joining other Republicans in trying to help the nominee articulate his views, asked Kavanaugh “whether you have any trouble ruling against a president who appointed you.”

“You’re correct. No one is above the law in our constitutional system,” Kavanaugh said. “The executive branch is subject to the law, subject to the court system.”

Kavanaugh passed up a chance to show his independence from Trump when Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) asked him whether he thought it was appropriate for the president to attack Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions for his prosecutors’ indictments of two GOP congressmen — Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of Alpine — ahead of the November election. Trump said it might endanger their reelection, ignoring the serious criminal charges against the men. Kavanaugh declined to offer his opinion. He also rebuffed a request from one Democratic senator that he recuse himself from any future cases involving the Mueller investigation of Trump and his campaign.

When Feinstein asked, “Can a sitting a president be required to respond to a subpoena?” Kavanaugh would not answer. “That’s a hypothetical question,” he said. “I can’t give you an answer to a hypothetical question.”

Kavanaugh did endorse as correct the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling in United States vs. Nixon, which required President Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes. It was “one of the greatest moments in American judicial history,” he said.

But he refused to give a similar endorsement for the 1973 ruling in Roe vs. Wade, which established a woman’s right to abortion. Feinstein tried to get him to say whether the ruling was correct; Kavanaugh said only that it was entitled to respect as a precedent.

Most legal experts predict that Kavanaugh, if confirmed, will provide the fifth conservative vote on the court to at least restrict abortion rights, if not overturn Roe. During his campaign, Trump promised to appoint only judges who would vote to overturn the abortion ruling.

But Kavanaugh seemed eager to raise some doubts about those predictions.

“I understand the significance on the issue,” he said Wednesday. “I don’t live in a bubble. I live in the real world.”

Kavanaugh noted several times that the 1973 abortion decision had been repeatedly affirmed, and that a 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which affirmed much of Roe, in effect created a “precedent on precedent.”

And he made an analogy to the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s decision not to overturn the so-called Miranda rights disclosure requirement for criminal suspects. Rehnquist had long opposed the Miranda ruling, but then decided it was too late to overturn it, he noted. It’s also true, however, that Rehnquist found ways to narrow the ruling’s impact.

Kavanaugh’s remarks about Roe may have been largely directed at two female Republican senators, who support abortion rights and whose votes will be key to his confirmation. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have not announced how they will vote.

But Kavanaugh gave no assurances about how he might vote, and nothing he said committed him to any particular outcome. In the past, some Supreme Court nominees have spoken about the importance of respecting precedents, and then once on the court voted to overturn them.

Feinstein, for one, seem unsatisfied. “We can’t accept vague promises from Brett Kavanaugh when women’s reproductive freedom is at stake,” she said on Twitter.

Live chat: Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in the Senate »

Last fall, Kavanaugh was involved in a dispute over whether a migrant teenager in Texas could be released from immigration custody to obtain an abortion. A federal judge cleared the way, but Kavanaugh wrote a 2-1 decision siding with Trump administration lawyers and blocking the abortion for up to 10 more days. The full appeals court intervened and overturned his ruling.

In dissent, Kavanaugh faulted his more liberal colleagues for wrongly creating a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain abortion on demand.”

He defended that ruling Wednesday, stressing that the girl was 17 and not yet an adult. “If she had been an adult, she would have had a right to obtain an abortion immediately,” he told Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

Durbin rejected the distinction, noting that the teenager had appeared before a state judge in Texas who decided she was sufficiently mature to make the decision on her own.

On guns, Kavanaugh stuck fast to his support of a broad 2nd Amendment right to possess many types of weapons, including a semiautomatic rifle with a large magazine of ammunition.

He dissented alone in 2011 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a D.C. ordinance that prohibited semiautomatic “assault weapons.”

Three years before, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia vs. Heller struck down a law prohibiting possession of a handgun at home and established a 2nd Amendment individual right for gun ownership.

Feinstein asked why Kavanaugh believed semiautomatic weapons could not be banned, when appellate judges across the country had upheld such restrictions.

“I had to follow precedent,” Kavanaugh replied. He said the late Justice Antonin Scalia said the 2nd Amendment did not protect weapons that are “dangerous and unusual,” and semiautomatic rifles are not unusual, he said. They are “widely possessed” by millions of gun owners, he said.

Kavanaugh did not back off, even when Feinstein spoke about the wave of mass shootings at schools using assault weapons. He stuck to the same position later when pressed by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

On the question of presidential power, Kavanaugh said that “no one is above the law,” a standard response by nominees.

But he declined to answer questions about whether Trump could pardon himself or pardon someone in exchange for an agreement not to testify against him, saying those were “hypothetical” questions that he couldn’t answer without potentially prejudging issues that might come before the courts.

The one issue that seemed to throw the nominee came from Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who confronted him with what the senator said was evidence that a Republican staff member during George W. Bush’s administration had supplied Kavanaugh — who was then helping to confirm judges — with information that had been stolen from Democratic files. Leahy said the information detailed what the senator planned to ask nominees during confirmation hearings.

Leahy, whose emails were stolen, quizzed Kavanaugh on whether he knowingly used the stolen documents, noting that Kavanaugh was included in an email chain discussing the information. Kavanaugh said he did not recall. “I don’t really have a specific recollection of any of this,” he told lawmakers.

Leahy said later Wednesday that Grassley agreed to release documents related to the materials he said were stolen, which are now confined only to lawmakers on the committee.

Grassley’s office didn’t make the same pledge. Spokesman Taylor Foy said Grassley would “do his best to accommodate this last-minute request,” adding that waiving the classification would require input from the White House and former President Bush.

Some of the most robust exchanges came near the end from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who has developed a reputation for her tough questioning of Trump nominees during confirmation hearings.

Harris referred back to Kavanaugh’s remark about a “precedent on precedent” concerning Roe vs. Wade, and asked if it were not true that any five justices could overturn a precedent if they wanted.

“There’s a reason why the Supreme Court doesn’t do that,” Kavanaugh responded. “There are times” when the justices do, he said, but it’s “rare.”

She also pressed Kavanaugh on whether he had any conversations about the Mueller investigation with anyone at a law firm founded by one of the president’s lawyers. Kavanaugh avoided answering the question several times, finally saying he remembered no such conversation. A Democratic aide said that Harris’ staff was continuing to investigate the matter.

Kavanaugh was pressed repeatedly to explain his relationship with Judge Alex Kozinski, the former chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals who retired last December after he was accused of sexually harassing female law clerks.

In 1991, Kavanaugh moved to Pasadena to work for one year as a law clerk for Kozinski. And he continued to consult with Kozinski over the years.

Kavanaugh said he had never heard of Kozinski harassing laws clerks or engaging in improper behavior until it was revealed last year in news stories. “It was a gut punch for me,” he said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said she was skeptical of his response. “It was an open secret, and it went on for 30 years,” she said.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) had a combative exchange with Kavanaugh while trying to pin the nominee down about his views on affirmative action. Booker asked if Kavanaugh believed that having a diverse student body is a compelling government interest that would justify considering race in admissions. Kavanaugh would not comment on his views, instead focusing on the Supreme Court’s precedent on affirmative action.

“I know what the law is now,” Booker said. “I’m worried about what the law is going to be when you get on the court.”

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UPDATES:

7:05 p.m.: This article was updated after Harris spoke.

5:30 p.m.: This article was updated with Booker’s comments and other new details.

4:55 p.m.: This article was updated with more details from the hearing.

3:30 p.m.: This article was updated with more comments from Feinstein, Kavanaugh and others.

9:50 a.m.: This article was updated with details about Miranda, presidential power and Leahy’s questions.

8:15 a.m.: This article was updated with Kavanaugh’s comments about gun rights.

This article was originally published at 8 a.m.