The Kavanaugh calculus
The smearing of Brett Kavanaugh was the most sordid spectacle I have witnessed in American politics, conducted as it was without regard for evidence, facts, logic, and presumptions of innocence or semblance of fairness.
That it eventually blew up in the Democrats’ faces hasn’t, however, prevented the left from doubling down; with the latest smear from The New
York Times so egregious as to make irresponsible and biased reporting more the story than whatever Kavanaugh did or didn’t do way back when.
As The Times is discovering, being “woke” 24/7 is hard, especially on journalistic standards.
The broader question, though, isn’t so much what happened back in Kavanaugh’s high school or college days or why The New York Times has become such a journalistic disgrace but why the Democrats and their media auxiliaries can’t seem to let it go.
Cathy Young, writing on The Bulwark, credits the left’s tendency to keep stepping on the same Kavanaugh rake to a combustible combination of “Believe Women” hysteria and anxiety over the court’s rightward shift; more specifically, the future of Roe v. Wade.
Of these two propellants, Roe probably possess the greater explanatory power, if only because a war between the sexes, as the more extreme manifestations of the #MeToo movement imply, isn’t in the interest of either, and too many women have brothers and fathers and sons they love and trust to ever accept the ridiculous “always believe women” principle.
All of which leaves us where we are usually left when it comes to the court—with what John Kass has called the left’s “scorched earth” approach to defending Roe.
Most obvious in that regard is how the smear campaign to which The Times most recently contributed represents an ongoing effort to pressure Kavanaugh into upholding that testament to judicial activism masquerading as jurisprudence, such that when the crucial moment arrives he will seek repentance and forgiveness from his tormentors as the price for being relieved of the unrelenting torment.
Having failed to keep Kavanaugh off the court with a series of uncorroborated, implausible accusations, the left now seeks to use still more uncorroborated, even more implausible accusations to try to intimidate him into ruling the right way while on it.
Indeed, the hunch is that were Kavanaugh to end up saving Roe, perhaps on the rationale of fealty to long-standing precedent, media interest in his allegedly beer-soaked, sexual predatory teenage days would abruptly vanish.
Even if such pressure tactics fail to influence Kavanaugh to rule the right way on Roe, the hope is that his vote to overturn would still have the kind of asterisk placed next to it suggested by Debra Katz, the activist attorney for his primary accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. As Katz, reportedly put it in a speech earlier this year, “He will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important. It is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”
The goal would therefore be to brand any ruling overturning Roe as the handiwork of a misogynist, possibly rapist, justice, perhaps even two of them, taking into account the accusations back in 1991 against Clarence Thomas.
Mobilization of “resistance” requires de-legitimization. And de-legitimization through character assassination is now the purpose of the left when it comes to Kavanaugh and any rulings he might issue from the bench.
Within this context, fear of the prospect of massive resistance and protests in the street in an already polarized, inflamed nation could in itself act as a powerful deterrent to tampering with Roe. If, as many claim, Chief Justice John Roberts was successfully pressured at the last minute to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare (by disingenuously reinterpreting a fine as a tax), one can only imagine the trepidation that will be felt by Roberts, Kavanaugh and the other conservatives on the court when it comes to addressing Roe.
The central problem of American politics is that the left increasingly assesses the legitimacy of American political institutions, whether the electoral college, the Senate or the Supreme Court, by the extent they satisfy the demands of the left.
In the end, then, the Kavanaugh story isn’t primarily about Kavanaugh, or even about abortion per se; it is about how political victories achieved through dubious means require dubious means to preserve.
When, as with Roe, judges creatively reinterpret constitutional provisions to achieve a desired public-policy result (in this case discovering a previously undiscovered right to abortion), the rule of law is undermined and the political process inevitably corrupted.
There have been a number of events that have divided Americans in recent decades, from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the disputed election of 2000 to the invasion of Iraq and the presidency of Donald Trump, but none of them has been as significant or fundamental as Roe.
It has poisoned American politics for nearly 50 years, even for those of us who favor legal access to abortion. Better it be finally overturned than continue to fester and produce the kind of moral rot demonstrated in the Kavanaugh spectacle.