As President Donald Trump has faced an onslaught of legal bids to block his agenda during his second term in office, Trump-nominated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh spoke at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit judicial conference on Thursday, according to reports.
‘Executive branches of both parties over the last 20 years have been increasingly trying to issue executive orders and regulations that achieve the policy objectives of the president in power,’ Kavanaugh said, according to the New York Times.
‘And I think presidents, whether it’s President Obama – I think the phrase was ‘pen and phone’ – or President Biden or President Trump, have really done more of that, and those get challenged pretty quickly in court,’ he said, according to CNN.
Unlike regular Supreme Court rulings that fully explain the rationale behind the decision, decisions on the high court’s emergency docket may go unexplained.
‘We’ve been doing certainly more written opinions on the interim orders docket than we’ve done in the past,’ Kavanaugh said, according to CNN.
Though he noted that issuing written opinions may pose the ‘risk’ of ‘lock-in effect’ in which that opinion does not ‘reflect the final view,’ reports indicate.
Kavanaugh described the court’s ‘collegiality’ as ‘very strong,’ noting that the nine members on the bench ‘look out for each other’ and consider one another ‘patriots’ and ‘good people,’ according to reports.
Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court during his first term in office.
He also nominated Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, meaning he chose one third of the current justices.