Brett Kavanaugh’s Colleagues Are Getting Awfully Tired of Brett Kavanaugh

In September 2025, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote what I believe will go down as, even by the standards of Supreme Court opinions, some of the most embarrassingly out-of-touch dreck I have ever had occasion to read. Over the course of a ten-page solo concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh—a 61-year-old white guy who has been a federal judge for fully one-third of his life—helpfully explained why the Supreme Court’s decision to greenlight racial profiling by federal immigration agents is no big deal at all, if you think about it.

The case was a challenge to ICE’s practice of detaining people in the Los Angeles area based solely on their race, their location, their occupation, and the language officers hear them speaking. But Kavanaugh asserts that people subjected to such stops are not meaningfully harmed, since they can “promptly go free” after a “typically brief” period of questioning.

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that this is simply not how immigration enforcement works in the real world. It also suggests that when Brett Kavanaugh sees Nazi soldiers giving “show me your papers” orders in the movies, he does not necessarily understand that they are the bad guys.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Trump administration, with a friendly assist from Kavanaugh, had effectively decreed “that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.” In the months since Vasquez Perdomo, these detentions have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Generally speaking, if you are a Supreme Court justice whose name pops up in connection with viral videos of ICE thugs clotheslining anyone caught speaking Spanish in the immediate vicinity of a Home Depot, that is a very good sign you did a very bad job.

Sotomayor’s remarks at an event at the University of Kansas School of Law earlier this week suggest that she is not done being annoyed about any of this. “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, ‘These are only temporary stops,’” Sotomayor told the students, per Bloomberg. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” (She did not mention Kavanaugh by name, but given that Kavanaugh grew up as the son of two lawyers in a wealthy D.C. suburb, and that, again, no other justice joined the concurrence she was criticizing, it is not especially difficult to discern whom Sotomayor was talking about.)

Sotomayor went on to detail the real-world consequences of, in Kavanaugh’s words, even “brief” periods of having to sit, handcuffed, in the back of a rented SUV until cops decide to let you go: “Those hours that they took you away—nobody’s paying that person,” she said. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night, and maybe just cold supper.”

Within the decorum-obsessed legal profession, this qualifies as wild stuff. Typically, Supreme Court justices bend over backwards to keep their comments about one another as banal as possible, emphasizing their deep, abiding respect for one another, and the professional (never personal) nature of their occasional disagreements. In this context, singling out a colleague for having no idea what life is like for people who are not double Yalies is as close as a Supreme Court justice gets to publicly suggesting that another Supreme Court justice is full of shit.

In the years since Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018, it has become very apparent that the other justices, diplomatic though they may be in polite company, kind of hate his guts. He has had a hard time writing opinions that earn the five votes necessary for a majority, and when he does write majority opinions, they are often sloppy enough to generate annoyed critiques from justices to his right and to his left.

As a result, Kavanaugh’s calling card has become the weird, incoherent solo concurrence in which he supplies wrong answers to questions no one asked, all in the cadence of a college sophomore padding a final paper using ChatGPT. I honestly think none of the conservatives joined Kavanaugh’s opinion in Vasquez Perdomo because, even though they were fine with giving Trump the result he wanted, none of them wanted to attach their names to a piece of writing that failed so badly to justify that result.

Even at the time of his nomination, Kavanaugh was, on paper, one of the weaker Supreme Court nominees in recent memory—a replacement-level GOP political operative whose primary qualifications, in Trump’s eyes, were his Federalist Society bona fides, his flexible approach to precedent, and his expansive views of executive power whenever the president is a Republican. If anything, his tenure as a justice has shown that critics who argued that Kavanaugh was unfit for the job actually overestimated his ability to do it. Sotomayor’s willingness to set aside the rules for a minute to air out her irritation in public—in front of a bunch of law students, no less—suggests that Kavanaugh’s colleagues are as tired of him as everyone else.

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