By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Confirming Brett Kavanaugh was the best outcome at the
end of a hellish decision tree that left the country with no ideal option.
Reasonable people may differ on that. But what seems more
obvious: It’s all going to get worse. Because everyone is taking the wrong
lessons from the Kavanaugh debacle.
Let’s start with the president. In an interview Saturday
night on Fox News Channel’s Justice with
Judge Jeanine, President Trump said that he was the one who “evened the
playing field” for Kavanaugh when he mocked Christine Blasey Ford at a
Mississippi rally the previous week.
“Well, there were a lot of things happening that weren’t
correct, they weren’t true, and there were a lot of things that were left
unsaid,” Trump told host Jeanine Pirro. “It was very unfair to the judge. . . .
So I evened the playing field. Once I did that, it started to sail through.”
This is mostly nonsense. Once Senator Jeff Flake of
Arizona had forced the FBI’s reinvestigation of Ford’s sexual-assault
allegation, Kavanaugh’s confirmation hinged on the FBI findings and the votes
of three Republican senators: Flake, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski
of Alaska.
The president’s comments mocking Ford, meanwhile, were
singularly unhelpful. Collins called them “Just plain wrong.” Flake: “It was
appalling.” Murkowski: “Wholly inappropriate.” Even Senator Lindsey Graham (R.,
S.C.) said he thought the president should “knock it off.”
Nor did Kavanaugh’s nomination “sail through” after that.
Instead, the headwinds got stronger, the water choppier, and the sharks
hungrier.
As Trump chummed the water, his nominee was rescued by a
team of RINOs. It was Flake’s FBI gambit, Collins’s sense of decency and
decorum, and the steely determination of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that got
Kavanaugh confirmed. (Remember when Steve Bannon was declaring McConnell Public
Enemy No. 1 of MAGA Nation?)
Trump cheerleaders could use a reminder of why Kavanaugh
was the nominee in the first place. Trump’s Supreme Court list — brimming with
GOP legal-establishment types, of whom Kavanaugh is the crown prince — was
imposed upon him by skeptics who feared he might nominate someone like . . .
Judge Jeanine Pirro.
But so much is forgotten, left behind in the locker room
as Trump and team celebrate on the field. The president, who deserves
conservative praise for picking Kavanaugh off the Federalist Society’s menu and
for sticking by him, is claiming and getting undue credit for the win. The fact
is, the president — himself repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual
misconduct — was largely a hindrance in the fight. And he’s now doing further
disservice to the new justice and to the Supreme Court by holding up Kavanaugh
like a partisan trophy, as he did Monday at a White House swearing-in ceremony
that verged on becoming a pep rally.
Such gloating and total war is the new statesmanship.
Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, argues that the
Kavanaugh battle retroactively vindicates Michael Anton’s famous “Flight 93”
argument of 2016: that the presidential election was a “charge the cockpit or
you die” moment for American conservatives. Now, Williams says, the middle has
collapsed, the parties are pulling farther apart, and it’s Flight 93 for as far
as the eye can see.
The Left largely sees the situation this way, too. In the
wake of their failure to destroy Kavanaugh, Democrats and liberal activists
insist they must “fight dirty,” as political scientist David Farris argues in
his book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty.
Liberals have convinced themselves that Democrats lose because they are too
nice. This, not ironically, was exactly the view conservatives such as Anton
held about the GOP in 2016; many voters rallied to Trump on the grounds that
“at least he fights.”
Stormy Daniels’s grandstanding lawyer, Michael Avenatti,
is auditioning to be the Left’s counter-puncher. In response to the GOP’s
Kavanaugh win, he tweeted, “When they go low, we hit harder. There is far too
much at stake for any other approach.” Never mind that it was Avenatti’s harder-hitting
allegations that steeled the GOP’s resolve to keep Democrats from railroading
Kavanaugh.
There are other echoes of 2016 on the Democratic side.
Many now flock to the banner of “socialism” the way the Bannonites rallied for
nationalism. And both sides are doubling down on identity politics — Trumpists
rushing to the defense of men, and leftists calling out white women who don’t
toe the line as “gender traitors.”
This is how we got here. It will get worse because there
are no incentives to be better. It won’t end well either, but at least it will
feel familiar.
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