Brett Kavanaugh defended the integrity of the Supreme Court Thursday, subtly pushing back on a narrative that the institution has become a rubber stamp for a right-wing policy agenda.

“The court is an institution of law. It’s an institution of law not of politics, not of partisanship,” Kavanaugh said at an event in Minnesota.

Kavanaugh's comments were the first of any justice since the court ended its term with a series of blockbuster rulings on affirmative action, student loans, and religious liberty.

Kavanaugh defends Supreme Court

The court's rulings on those controversies were divided along predictable ideological lines, driving a perception among many that the court is merely another arena for political battles.

But Kavanaugh dismissed that notion, saying the justices work as team despite their sometimes-sharp disagreements.

"We have lived up, in my estimation, to deciding cases based on law and not based on partisan affiliation and partisanship,” Kavanaugh said.

“We don’t caucus in separate rooms. We don’t meet separately. We’re not sitting on different sides of the aisle at an oral argument. … We work as a group of nine.”

Extreme?

To Kavanaugh's point, the Supreme Court this term did not rule in favor of conservatives on a pair of voting rights cases.

Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts had crossed the aisle to side with the liberals in one of those cases, and the verdict in the other elections dispute was even more lopsided.

Still, the left has sought to delegitimize the court as a bastion of ideological extremism ever since it began moving to the right under President Trump, and especially since it reversed Roe v. Wade last year.

President Biden has sharply attacked the court's legitimacy on several occasions - characterizing it as "extreme" and "not normal."

The leftist coup

The left's pressure campaign has also gotten very personal.

Last summer, as Biden and his allies were stoking outrage over abortion, a man attempted to assassinate Kavanaugh.

Of course, Kavanaugh rose to the court after what was arguably the most brutal and unscrupulous effort in history to derail a nominee.

The rolling coup against the court hasn't stopped, with increasingly targeted media attacks on the "ethics" of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both conservatives. Kavanaugh did not indulge the contrived "ethics" controversy, instead deferring to past comments from Roberts.

“That’s accurate,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m not going to add anything to what the chief justice has said on that topic.”