Justice Brett Kavanaugh pushed back on any notion that the Supreme Court is experiencing tension because of the 6-3 ideological split among the justices, saying, "We eat lunch together" around 65 times a year.
“You don’t really appreciate until you’re there how much time you spend just with these eight other people,” Kavanaugh said at a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conference in Bloomington, Minnesota. “It’s the same eight every time. In the conference room, it’s the nine of us."
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Kavanaugh said the justices eat lunch together after each oral argument, noting, "That's about 65 lunches a year.
“That’s a lot of lunch. Imagine taking eight other people at random and say, ‘We’re gonna have lunch 65 times,’” the justice said as a crowd of several hundred lower-court judges in attendance laughed, according to Politico.
Kavanaugh's comments come just weeks after the Supreme Court concluded its latest term, which included several polarizing 6-3 decisions in which the Republican-appointed majority struck down affirmative action and rejected President Joe Biden's bid to forgive 40 million student loan borrowers' debt.
Appointed by former President Donald Trump to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, Kavanaugh downplayed the notion that the Supreme Court is driven by the conservative supermajority, saying a lot of decisions this term were "9-0, but then there might be a lot of 7-2, 6-3s with all sorts of different lineups.
"The relationships withstand that, I think, because we are working together on so many different cases," the justice said.
Kavanaugh even pointed to several rulings decided this past term that were generally favored among Democratic voters and lawmakers, including a case surrounding the Voting Rights Act where he and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices in favor of black voters challenging racial gerrymandering. He also mentioned the 6-3 ideologically mixed decision he joined to reject a conservative legal theory that sought to weaken lower courts' adjudication of election rules passed by state legislatures.
The remarks come as the Supreme Court has endured a year of scrutiny since its tumultuous term last summer that saw weeks of protests outside the high court after the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion signaling the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It was the leak of that 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson last May that led to a tailspin in public disapproval of the Supreme Court. More recently, public opinion has been improving, with a roughly 42% public approval rating as of June, according to FiveThirtyEight.
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Kavanaugh did not directly reference any of the protests conservative justices faced at their homes in the wake of the Dobbs leak, nor did he make any mention of the June 2022 assassination attempt on him by a 26-year-old man who flew from California to Chevy Chase, Maryland.
The justice did however make note of a series of publications raising ethics concerns about members of the high court, saying, "There’s been a lot of press stories about ethics,” before declining to say anything more on the topic beyond confirming Roberts' statement in May that the court is still trying to come up with ethics policies to help alleviate some of the criticism.