Brett Kavanaugh’s fiery opening statement in his defense may have not only saved his nomination, but the Republican Party. New polls are suggesting that the campaign to destroy him energized the Republican base the way nothing else had in a while. And anecdotally, it’s the one thing that Republicans are talking about and impassioned about.
Over the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, I was in many homes, and I kept hearing the refrain again and again. Outrage.
If this trend holds, Republicans will be more likely to vote in midterm elections and the Democrat landslide is suddenly in trouble. There was too much complacency, general disgust with congress, and a lack of focus a few weeks ago.
The campaign to destroy Kavanaugh turned that around. It’s unifying even anti-Trump conservatives (I speak of conservatives, not the Quislings of the left like Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, George Will and the rest of their media lapdog ilk.)
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial, Never Conservatives, summing some of this up.
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…
his 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…
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.
This is the truth that conservatives should take with them to the next session of phony outrage about Trump’s disruptiveness to our norms.
These actions are being delivered by a political movement whose leaders are rapists and murderers, who have no norms of civility or decency, only of ideological extremism, who seek total control over society and the total destruction of their enemies by any means.
The vicious assault on Brett Kavanaugh is what the left is. It’s what it intends for every one of us.
Many conservatives watching that hearing realized it. They saw the same tactics that the left has been deploying locally on a national scale. They saw it and they’re standing up against it.
The media sometimes profess to be puzzled that more than 80% of Republicans across the country tell pollsters they support Mr. Trump despite his personal flaws. The Never Conservatives are the reason, and the assault on Judge Kavanaugh is the latest showcase of their methods. Republicans have figured out that if the left can willfully, even gleefully, destroy a man as distinguished as Brett Kavanaugh, they can and will do it to any conservative who threatens their grip on power.
Republicans are well aware of Mr. Trump’s excesses and falsehoods. But they have also come to understand that the resistance to him isn’t rooted in principle or some august call to superior character. They know Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her history of deceit. Voters know this is about the left’s will to power by any means necessary.
Republicans across America can see, and certainly their Senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.
Going to war on Kavanaugh did what nothing else seemed able to do, it’s unifying the GOP.
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