With the Kavanaugh circus, the judicial confirmation process sinks lower

Idon’t know precisely what impact the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight will have on the eventual outcome of California’s U.S. Senate race on Nov. 6.

Perhaps Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s standing with the disgruntled left gets a boost after she passed along the letter alleging a sexual assault by Kavanaugh when he was in high school, which has President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee very much in limbo. Or perhaps that rift widens because Feinstein sat on the information for roughly six weeks, and if she’d released the letter earlier the nomination could have already collapsed under the weight of #MeToo pressure.

This much I do know: In this latest example of Washington blood sport, the federal judicial confirmation process may have hit rock bottom.

The Kavanaugh circus has been one part Ruth Bader Ginsburg (she set the tone for nominees purposely ducking questions), a second part Clarence Thomas (late-inning character assassination) and a third part Neil Gorsuch (if Kavanaugh survives, it will be a partisan decision).

It brings to mind the confirmation saga of Janice Rogers Brown. In May 1996, then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed Brown, his legal affairs secretary, to the California Supreme Court despite the State Bar’s insistence that she was “unqualified.” Its evaluation committee said she had too little judicial experience; Wilson claimed it was crass politics.

Seven years later, then-President George W. Bush tapped Brown for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — also known as the Supreme Court’s “farm team.”

It took two years for Brown, who retired last year, to reach the federal bench. Brown, an Alabama sharecropper’s daughter who put herself through Sacramento State, was in line to become the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice. That, combined with her conservative outlook, terrified her foes.

To give you a sense of how little we’ve progressed in the last 15 years, the White House memo that makes the case for Brown details her ideological bona fides. It anticipates the pushback from the other side of the aisle, picking apart her speeches and written decisions. And the memo lays out how her nomination starts with a solid base of Republican votes (but not Sen.Susan Collins of Maine,now a key vote for in the Kavanaugh nomination) and puts a handful of red-state Democratic incumbents in a political bind should they oppose her.

The name at the top of that memo? A Bush White House aide named Brett Kavanaugh.

Replace Brown’s name with Kavanaugh’s, alter some biographical details, supplant ethnicity with abortion, and the memo easily could be passed around the Trump White House. And that’s not progress.

There is no magic wand to fix what ails the federal court process. Conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia was confirmed on a 98-0 vote and liberal icon Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3, but confirming a Supreme Court justice solely on his or her judicial temperament seems unlikely today

One suggestion popular with some judicial scholars is to impose 18-year term limits on the nine Supreme Court justices with retirements occurring in the odd years of a president’s term. That would give each president two picks per term. Term limits would get us around the power play of 2016 when Senate Republicans denied President Barack Obama a nominee.

But would a term-limited Supreme Court fix the Senate’s broken moral compass? That’s one of many questions to ask Feinstein the next times she’s back in California.