Food

Brett Kavanaugh added pizza to the Supreme Court cafeteria, but these don’t pass the bar

By Tim Carman
Jan. 30, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EST

To reach the Supreme Court cafeteria, you have to pass through a metal detector, walk down a marble corridor and stroll by a portrait of the late Justice Antonin Scalia hanging right next to the lunchroom. The painting depicts Scalia, the first Italian American to sit on the high court, in a casual pose, with his black robe unzipped, revealing a girth that has known the pleasures of the table. The justice looks all but ready to dig into, say, a Hawaiian calzone with pineapple, mozzarella and ham (a featured dish this week at the cafe) before returning to oral arguments.

Were he still alive, Scalia, I suspect, would take Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to task for the pizza that the court’s newest member recently added to the first-floor cafeteria. I mean, if these new pies were cases before the court, the justices would rule them unconstitutional. (Well, at least eight of them would.) They’d dismiss them with extreme prejudice. They’d send them back to a lower court for further deliberation or, even better, an extreme makeover.

[These are the D.C. area’s 10 best pizzas]

But hold on. I’m getting ahead of myself.

As Robert Barnes, The Washington Post’s veteran Supreme Court reporter, has pointed out on numerous occasions, the court’s junior member sits on the cafeteria committee until the next new justice is sworn in. The duty is something akin to frat-house hazing for folks dressed in Darth Vader robes.

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Tim Carman
Tim Carman is a food reporter at The Washington Post, where he has worked since 2010. Previously, he served for five years as food editor and columnist at Washington City Paper. Follow https://twitter.com/timcarman