Justices are 'losing patience': Brett Kavanaugh skewered as a 'lightweight' in brutal analysis

The U.S. Supreme Court has a clear intellectual liability in Justice Brett Kavanaugh, according to a legal analyst, and the other justices are sick of "lightweight" opinions.

Patience is wearing thin for the Donald Trump appointee, who rarely writes important or noteworthy opinions – in fact, he wrote fewer words than any justice in the most recent term -- and his colleagues keep calling out his lack of rigor in their own opinions, reported Slate.

"[Clarence] Thomas, [Amy Coney] Barrett, and [Neil] Gorsuch aren’t the only members of the court who are losing patience with Kavanaugh," wrote senior writer Mark Joseph Stern. "Justice Elena Kagan memorably castigated him for treating 'judging as scorekeeping,' whining about 'how unfair it is' when he loses, and repeating the same bad arguments 'at a higher volume.' Justice Sonia Sotomayor has repeatedly accused him of outright dishonesty by misrepresenting precedent and dangling false promises. In a fed-up dissent in just her first term, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared a Kavanaugh majority opinion to the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. [Samul] Alito’s rebuttal to Kavanaugh’s dissent in Sackett v. EPA consisted of exactly one sentence: Kavanaugh’s argument, Alito wrote, 'cannot be taken seriously.'"

The only justice who hasn't blasted his opinions is chief Justice John Roberts, with whom Kavanaugh has voted the same in 98 percent of cases, but Stern found the few opinions he does author tend to sound more like backlash management than legal analysis.

"It wasn’t supposed to be like this," Stern wrote. "During his 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh styled himself as a brainy operator who combined intellectual firepower with affable moderation, in rhetoric if not in substance. He wanted to be the conservative whom liberals could respect — Justice Antonin Scalia without the volcanic temper — and the high-minded jurist who could sell right-wing legal theories to the public as common-sense constitutional principles."

"Over the past five years, that version of Brett Kavanaugh has receded from view," Stern added. "In its place has emerged a man with seemingly few fixed convictions and even fewer interesting things to say. To the extent that his colleagues think about him at all, they seem to view him as a fixer who can cobble together five votes for a diaphanous majority opinion that decides almost nothing."