The Kavanaugh fight isn’t about Trump. We’re all deplorables now.
Brett Kavanaugh isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s New York menagerie, or some Steve Bannon insurgent. The judge is the epitome of the GOP legal establishment, a Supreme Court nominee from central casting. He went to the best schools and served his apprenticeship among legal elites including a clerkship with former Justice Anthony Kennedy.
He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer. He served at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House staff in positions of great trust. On the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, he has written more than 300 opinions and had at least 10 adopted by the Supreme Court. He has taught at Harvard Law School at the invitation of then dean, and now Justice, Elena Kagan.
With these credentials Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. He could have been Jeb Bush’s nominee, or John Kasich’s, though Mr. Kasich in the ambitious ebb of his career now tilts with the anti-conservative left against Mr. Kavanaugh. In 2012 the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh would have been Mitt Romney’s “most likely first nominee” for the High Court. Mr. Toobin, who loathes conservatives, meant it as a warning.
Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.
Yet this is precisely why Democrats and the left have set out to destroy Judge Kavanaugh—not in legal philosophy or competence, which they knew was a political loser, but as a human being, a spouse and father. They need to destroy him personally with accusations but no corroboration, as they tried with Clarence Thomas, so they can deny the open Supreme Court seat to a judicial conservative.
So much the better if playing the #MeToo card also helps Democrats retake Congress. In this sense too, Mr. Trump is the left’s foil, though the Kavanaugh fight has usefully exposed the dishonesty of the loud worries about Mr. Trump’s threat to “democratic norms.”
Democrats were so worried about Senate norms that they hid Ms. Ford’s name from Republicans for six weeks, found her a lawyer, midwifed a lie detector test whose results they still haven’t fully disclosed, and then orchestrated the rollout of her accusations. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is too often divisive and dissembling, but no action in his Presidency comes close to matching the partisan viciousness of the Senate ambush of Brett Kavanaugh. These are today’s Democratic norms.