It’s a lengthy read, but here are the key takes on judicial ideology:

• “Even as he climbed the ladder of Washington’s conservative legal establishment, Kavanaugh remained staunchly nonpartisan in his schmoozing. “He was the kind of conservative you could go out to dinner with,” says Ruth Marcus, a liberal columnist at The Washington Post who knew Kavanaugh early in his career and later wrote a book about him called Supreme Ambition.”
• As a judge, he spent most of his time on wonky regulatory cases, which meant his conservative voting record attracted little attention in the culture wars. And when a politically charged case did fall into his lap, in 2017—involving an undocumented 17-year-old immigrant seeking an abortion in Texas—Kavanaugh tried to find a middle course. Rather than rule decisively on whether the abortion could proceed, he argued that the government should be given more time to find the young woman a “sponsor” who could help her make the decision. The ruling pleased no one, but it suggested an instinct for caution that made his brand of conservatism palatable in Washington.
• In private, Kavanaugh had expressed his own misgivings about the president who nominated him, even as he went through the requisite motions of flattery and fealty. “He was no fan of Donald Trump,” one friend told me. “But he’s not going to say no to the nomination. He had to kiss the ring to get there.”
• In his first term, he voted with Kagan as often as he did with Gorsuch. When he did come down on the right in a divisive case, he would write a separate opinion explaining himself in almost apologetic terms.
• “He really cares how he’s perceived across the ideological spectrum,” David Lat, the founding editor of the influential legal-commentary site Above the Law, told me. “I would say Justice Kavanaugh is trying to be the conservative that people don’t hate.”
• Conservative votes: “He cast the deciding vote in a ruling that allowed states to continue practicing partisan gerrymandering, [and he voted] to allow the Trump administration to include a citizenship question on the census, [and is feared to have]  open antagonism toward what is known as the Chevron doctrine, the legal principle that courts should give great weight to the interpretations adopted by federal agencies as they administer complicated regulations. … If Kavanaugh leads his conservative colleagues in overturning Chevron, Democrats warn, legal challenges will tie regulators’ hands and hobble the implementation of progressive policies—affecting everything from health care to the environment to corporate oversight.
• At the same time, Kavanaugh has disappointed many of the right-wing activists who expected [more]. The grumbling began last year, when he voted to allow the Manhattan district attorney access to Donald Trump’s tax records. But frustration really boiled over in February, when his swing vote prevented the Supreme Court from hearing a slate of lawsuits challenging the election results brought by Trump and his allies. Across the Trumpist media, Kavanaugh was derided as a coward and a traitor. John Cardillo, a host at Newsmax, summarized the sentiment on Twitter: “Shame on Kavanaugh for playing ball after they tried to destroy him and his family.”
• Kavanaugh had raised concerns at the Federalist Society, which vets the conservative bona fides of judicial candidates. He was added to Trump’s shortlist only after an intense lobbying campaign by Republican friends, most notably Anthony Kennedy, the justice he had clerked for and eventually replaced. 
•  “I don’t think Thomas or Alito gives a shit what The New York Times says about them,” one friend told me. “But I think Brett does.”

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court/618717/

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.