October 24, 2024

By Irin Carmon

Photo: Haiyun Jiang/Redux

In the fall of 2018, during the convulsive, unformed days after Christine Blasey Ford went public to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, one report in particular rankled Usha Vance.

She had clerked for then-Judge Kavanaugh only three years earlier, a role that was often a stepping stone to a clerkship on the Supreme Court, as it was for Usha. When Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh for a promotion to the high court that summer, Republicans presented him as a champion of women, the better to blunt his expected impact. A laudatory letter from 18 of Kavanaugh’s female clerks was submitted to the Senate in July. Usha was by then working for Chief Justice Roberts and barred from this type of political comment. But her husband, J.D., and his mentor and Yale law professor Amy Chua each contributed enthusiastic Wall Street Journal op-eds to the cause. Chua wrote that she’d successfully recommended eight Yale Law women to clerkships with Kavanaugh; her own daughter would soon join their ranks. J.D., made famous by the enormous success of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and at the time playing the role of principled critic of Donald Trump, praised another Yale Law grad, Kavanaugh, as an inspiration and fellow outnumbered conservative — as well as someone who had given his wife a job.

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.