No, Brett Kavanaugh Doesn’t Think Killer Whale Shows Are a Professional Sport
People I respect like Judge Napolitano have raised serious concerns about Brett Kavanaugh because of his rulings on privacy issues related to the Patriot Act etc.; see Judge Nap’s appearance on the Tom Woods Show for more details.
But what is a completely bogus criticism is that in his (in)famous dissent in the SeaWorld case, Kavanaugh had to stoop to the argument that putting on a killer whale show was the same thing as a professional sport, and since OSHA doesn’t interfere with safety in sports, therefore it shouldn’t mess with SeaWorld. (“Ha ha, what a right-wing tool, Kavanaugh can’t tell the difference between LeBron and Shamu.”)
For example, here’s a ThinkProgress piece repeating the claim, accompanied by an apparently smoking-gun quote from Kavanaugh’s opinion:
Now to be clear, this is totally wrong. Kavanaugh did NOT say that putting on a killer whale show was a sport. He repeatedly talked about the “sports and entertainment industries” in his decision, and was making arguments pertaining to both of them.
And the author of the ThinkProgress piece knew that, because he clipped the above quotation. Here is the context taken from Kavanaugh’s decision (starts on page 24 in this PDF), where I have continued the quote to the end of the sentence:
Ha, he didn’t even have the decency to put in an ellipsis. He just changed the comma to a period.
Kavanaugh was a prosecutor in the Vince Foster Arkancide.
The fact HRC lost is bigger than anyone can imagine.