Hang up your hats, Kavanaugh fans. Prepare yourselves for an epic Borking in the Senate.
Thanks to some class-A truth-seeking at The Washington Post, the unsuspecting public now knows the great scandal that President Trump has heaped upon them with his SCOTUS pick: Judge Kavanaugh once had credit card debt. But wait, there’s more (and this is truly egregious), he then had the audacity to pay it off.
After diving into judge Kavanaugh’s finances for 2016, WaPo discovered that the SCOTUS nominee had anywhere between $60,000 and $200,000 in debt, which he then paid off the following year.
The debt reportedly stemmed from three credit cards and a Thrift Savings Plan Loan, a significant portion of which came from Washington Nationals baseball season tickets he had purchased for a “handful” of friends along with his family. Another significant portion came from housing expenses, according to White House spokesman Raj Shah. By 2017, Kavanaugh paid most of it off:
The credit card debts and loan were either paid off or fell below the reporting requirements in 2017, according to the filings, which do not require details on the nature or source of such payments. Shah told The Post that Kavanaugh’s friends reimbursed him for their share of the baseball tickets and that the judge has since stopped purchasing the season tickets.
As if to further imply that something nefarious had taken place, the Post noted that “Shah did not provide the names of the friends” for whom Kavanaugh had purchased tickets.
The report then explores Judge Kavanaugh’s net worth and financial assets, which clock somewhere in the neighborhood between $15,000 and $65,000. Shah also confirmed the judge has a retirement account “worth nearly half a million dollars.” For his home, which he and his wife purchased for close to a million dollars, Kavanaugh owes $865,000.
This puts Kavanaugh on track to earning the title of poorest justice on the Supreme Court, if confirmed.
Unlike Kavanaugh’s potential colleagues, much of his career has been spent in the public sector, where he has earned the majority of his income.
The Post concludes its article noting that the Kavanaughs send their two daughters to Catholic school, which costs $10,025 per child. Exactly what any of this has to do with Kavanaugh’s judicial responsibility was lost on many readers:
