The ridiculous smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh

President Trump's Supreme Court nominee is broke like the rest of us. So what?

Brett Kavanaugh.
(Image credit: Illustrated | MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images, Radu Bighian/iStock, IMOGI/iStock)

Can you believe that an actual real-life prospective Supreme Court justice nominated by President Trump had thousands of dollars in — gasp — credit card debt? And that Judge Brett Kavanaugh is reported to have run it up buying, of all things, baseball tickets?

Like many social conservatives, I have serious reservations about Kavanaugh. But he has won at least a measure of my esteem by being made the subject of breathless reports about his personal finances. According to The Washington Post's analysis of financial disclosure forms, Kavanaugh "at times reported liabilities that could have exceeded the value of his cash accounts and investment assets." What is this supposed to tell us? That, in common with millions of Americans, he owes more money to financial institutions than he in fact possesses? The most recent available records suggest that he has "reportable assets between $15,000 and $65,000, which would put him at the bottom of the financial ranking of justices, most of whom list well over $1 million in assets."

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.