Go on, wrinkle your brow, grit your teeth, try to dream up a better nominee for Supreme Court justice than Brett Kavanaugh, and you’ll struggle because he’s got it all. He’s a true constitutionalist with intellect, experience and solid character, but forget all of that because Democrats hysterically see grotesque peril in him and probably in a rose garden and a light blue sky.
It’s a peculiar time we live in. If President Donald Trump is around, critics will enumerate his myriad and sometimes serious faults and then outdo him. When he is getting things right, they are particularly distraught, given the political implications, and, in his nomination of Kavanaugh, he got a lot right.
For as long as a generation or more, Kavanaugh and four other of his judicially wise colleagues could actually manage to keep the preciousness of our governmental system intact.
Right now, the different opinions about Kavanaugh are labeled liberal and conservative, but it’s judicial philosophy that counts, not politics or outcomes that are feverishly desired no matter what the law says. In too much of the past, the court’s judicial philosophy has been that the clear meanings of the Constitution should be reduced to vaporous, pick-and-choose ideals, that unmentioned rights could be invented, the content of laws contradicted, judicial limits exceeded and the other branches of government as much as replaced.