One of the rites of passage for becoming a prominent conservative politician is having a former friend reveal one of their private dealings to the mainstream media, as happened with J.D. Vance. One of Vance’s YLS classmates The New York Times More than 90 emails and text messages from 2014 to 2017, some of which reflect on the Supreme Court.
In 2014, they were both about a year out of law school and near the beginning of their careers.
Vance said he plans to buy a house in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Usha, whom he also met at Yale.
The Vance family was able to afford a home in Washington’s expensive market in part because Vance had begun working for a big law firm. “It sucked,” he wrote at the time, expressing his distaste for the career he had turned down. He lasted less than two years at the high-end law firm Sidley Austin.
In the same correspondence, Vance also wrote about his wife’s interviews with Supreme Court justices for clerkships, and that he worried that her appearance of political neutrality, or lack of “ideological talent,” would hurt her chances.
“Justices Scalia and Kagan moved very quickly,” Vance wrote, referring to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, and Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three current liberal justices, “but she did not work out well for Justice Scalia.”
“His homophobic rants are hard to believe in 2014,” Nelson replied.
“He’s become a very vocal old man,” Vance responded. “I used to like him a lot and believed all his arguments about judicial minimalism were sincere. Now I see it as a political farce.”
Mrs. Vance would eventually clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Wow, there’s a lot to unravel here.
First, Vance has famously done a 180-degree turn on Trump. Where once he had some of the harshest words for Trump, he is now one of Trump’s most ardent defenders. Before 2016, I think it was expected that Yale conservatives would be critical of Trump. But Vance’s criticism of Justice Scalia was a whole other matter. This email, sent by Justice Scalia in 2014, Windsor The dissenting opinion: This is almost certainly what a friend of Vance called a “homophobic tirade.”
Windsor This was one of Scalia’s last great dissents. Here is the preface:
This case is about power in some ways: the power of the people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce laws. Today’s decision has the predictable result of exaggerating the latter and diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. Even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to strike down this democratically adopted law. The Court’s errors on both counts spring from the same sick source: a lofty conception of the role of this institution in America.
Justice Scalia was a descendant of the conservative legal movement. He sometimes pissed us off, but we would never say he was engaged in “political farce.” If you polled members of the Federalist Society in 2014, how many of you would have attacked Scalia in those terms? I would guess the number would be extremely small. In fact, I’m not even sure Vance was a member of the Federalist Society. I graduated from law school just a few years before him. I first heard of him in Hillbilly Elegy It came out of nowhere. I had never heard of him and remember being surprised to learn he was a recent YLS graduate. I was far more bothered by Vance’s criticism of Scalia than anything he said about Trump.
Second, Vance gives an unwitting insight into the adjudication game. He describes his future wife, Usha Chirukuri, as politically neutral and lacking “ideological talent.” At Yale, the adjudication position is considered something of a birthright. The only question is, Which Justice will hire them. The same candidate both Justices Kagan and Scalia (famous for his “homophobic rants”) suggest she intended to appeal to both ends of the spectrum. Justice Scalia is known for hiring clerks, but I’m not convinced Usha is clerk-qualified.
Third, Vance offers further unwitting insight into the types of judges who ended up hiring very good law clerks who lacked “ideological talent”: Amr Thapar of the Eastern District of Kentucky, Brett Kavanaugh of the DC Circuit, and Chief Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court. In 2014, these judges were known for not subjecting their hires to any FBI litmus tests and for hiring clerks at both ends of the aisle. And they did the same with Usha.
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It is always dangerous to judge people by what they did in their youth. People can grow from past setbacks. In fact, I think a lot of the backlash to my post about Kamala Harris failing the bar exam is misplaced. I pointed out at the end that other very prominent people have failed the bar exam and gone on to be very successful. I think Joe Biden Law School PlagiarismElena Kagan’s Average freshman performance,and Mitt Romney I’ve never even taken the bar exam!
So how do we explain Vance’s comments just one year after graduating from a top school? Was he just telling his liberal friends the standard liberal party line? Did he really not understand what Justice Scalia was doing, perhaps due to his poor legal education at a left-leaning undergraduate school? Did he never seek out opportunities to learn about Justice Scalia at Supreme Court events or otherwise? Or did he really believe what he wrote about Justice Scalia? If so, did he ever abandon those views? And what kind of justices would Vance recommend to the Court? I would like to hear the answers to these questions.
