In a one-page document, which was obtained by Politico, the White House wrote that Kavanaugh has overruled federal regulators 75 times on cases involving clean air, consumer protections, net neutrality, and other issues. Most recently, in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he favored curtailing the power of independent federal regulators.

“Judge Kavanaugh protects American businesses from illegal job-killing regulation,” the White House bragged in its e-mail, adding that “Kavanaugh helped kill President Obama’s most destructive new environmental rules,” and has “led the effort to rein in unaccountable independent agencies.” Indeed, the nominee has in fact written that “independent agencies pose a significant threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances.” In a 2016 appellate-court case, he said that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was “unconstitutionally structured,” because its director cannot be fired by the president without cause, suggesting that, should it come to it, he’ll grant Acting Director Mick Mulvaney’s lifelong dream of seeing the agency burned to the ground.

Elsewhere, critics say that Kavanaugh’s time on the bench has been marked by “hostility to federal regulatory agencies trying to protect the environment.” According to Bill Snape, a senior counsel with the Center for Biological Diversity, Kavanaugh “sides with industry, he sides with deregulation, he sides with those who would have science be in retreat. He has been a dark force on the D.C. Circuit and now seems to have the opportunity to bring his bag of tricks to the Supreme Court.”

All of which, obviously, makes him the perfect candidate for Trump. Just something to remember should you work in an environment where you could be construed by colleagues as a tasty snack.

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Trump has no idea how NATO works

Here’s what the president of the United States tweeted on Tuesday, one day before the summit in Brussels:

In fact, that’s not how the alliance works at all. Members do not pay the United States, hence they cannot be “delinquent for many years in payments,” nor should they “reimburse the U.S.” Rather, as President Twitter is seemingly unaware, NATO is a collective defense organization whose members agree to defend one another in response to an attack by an outside party. While it was agreed that members will increase their defense spending levels to 2 percent of their G.D.P., they said they would do so by 2024, not whatever earlier date Trump has in mind. As is the case with most instances of the president saying or tweeting things that are factually inaccurate, one cannot, as New York’s Jonathan Chait writes, “rule out the possibility that Trump lacks the mental capacity to understand the basic form of America’s most important alliance.” But given his apparent hatred of NATO and desire to pull out of any multilateral agreements signed before he took office, it’s equally possible that, as Chait writes, Trump is “choosing not to understand this, so that he can precipitate a fissure within the alliance.”