President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, is not "some firebrand right-winger," as critics have suggested, according to a veteran Republican strategist.
"The reality is, he's not some firebrand right-winger," said Dan Senor, a GOP strategist who worked alongside Kavanaugh in former President George W. Bush’s administration, on "CBS This Morning" on Tuesday. "You can't put him in that box. Eleven of his opinions have been adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Seven of his clerks have gone on to clerk for Justice Kennedy. Kennedy was his mentor. He's not some right-wing extremist."
He added that the jurist will not waste time in trying to win over Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both moderate Republicans who support abortion rights.
"If you listen to Kavanaugh last night, his acceptance speech was basically a letter to Collins and Murkowski," he said. "My daughters, look how involved I am in my daughters' lives,' a tribute to his mother — he basically reminded me of the 'binders full of women'" by calling out how many women he's hired over the years.
Senor noted that three Democrats voted for Trump’s previous Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, and said that this time "there will be enormous pressure on them. I think the tension is the following: Trump is more popular in their states than Democratic leadership is, and if he decides to lean into this it's harder for these red-state Democrats. But the national fundraising arm of the left, all these center-left groups who care about this issue and think Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance here are going to be deploying huge amounts of money on these particular red-state Democrats, and I think they're gonna have to basically choose between those two."
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