The American Bar Association had concerns about Kavanaugh 12 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/28/american-bar-association-had-kavanaugh-concerns-years-ago-republicans-dismissed-those-too/?utm_term=.7fa264a5fc2c


By Avi Selk
September 28, 2018

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Flash back to the mid-2000s and another fight in the Senate over Kavanaugh’s nomination to a federal court:

Democrats for three years had been blocking President George W. Bush’s 2003 nomination of Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. They argued he was biased, as shown by his work as a lawyer for Bush’s presidential campaign, for an independent counsel’s investigation into President Bill Clinton and for other conservative causes.

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in May 2006, as Republicans hoped to finally push Kavanaugh’s nomination across the finish line, the ABA downgraded its endorsement.

The group’s judicial investigator had recently interviewed dozens of lawyers, judges and others who had worked with Kavanaugh, the ABA announced at the time, and some of them raised red flags about “his professional experience and the question of his freedom from bias and open-mindedness.”

“One interviewee remained concerned about the nominee’s ability to be balanced and fair should he assume a federal judgeship,” the ABA committee chairman wrote to senators in 2006.

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In the end, the ABA committee weighed Kavanaugh’s “solid reputation for integrity, intellectual capacity, and writing and analytical ability” against “concern over whether this nominee is so insulated that he will be unable to judge fairly in the future.” In a split vote, it downgraded the rating of the nominee to simply “qualified” — meaning he met the ABA’s standards to become a judge but was not necessarily an outstanding candidate.

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