Trump Galvanized a Movement of Women. Kavanaugh Is Testing It.

In his first appearance before the nation, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh positioned himself as an ally of social change for women in America. Standing beside President Trump at the White House, Judge Kavanaugh spoke of being a father of daughters and a coach to a girls’ basketball team. He hailed his mother’s legal career. He boasted that most of his clerks had been women.

Coming in the era of #MeToo and the Women’s March, of greater attention to wage inequality for women and campus sexual assaults, Judge Kavanaugh was trying to reassure the many women around the country who may have been assessing him, and the president beside him, warily. He was, after all, a 53-year-old jurist and ambitious veteran of Republican politics who would be a potentially decisive vote on litigation over women’s rights — including the right to terminate a pregnancy.

But if Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was freighted with import for women, the battle over his confirmation has swelled into an event of titanic consequence in the country’s evolution on matters of gender and women’s equality. CONT.

Alexander Burns, Elizabeth Dias & Susan Chira, New York Times