The attempt to revive last year’s Brett Kavanaugh fracas by way of a book and a New York Times story was a loss for the Democrats in more ways than one.
First, the new charges turned out to have no more basis than the original ones. Second, the high court is the one cause that unites all Republicans. And third, it blew up the biggest and best card that the Democrats have to play in next year’s elections: that President Trump has “shattered the norms” of polite public discourse. True, Trump seems to step on a norm every time he opens his mouth, but his transgressions seem small indeed next to the rampage of unrestrained breakage that results each time a Democrat comes within striking distance of a Republican president’s Supreme Court nominee.
Norm No. 1 was put to the sword in 1987, when Edward M. Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate to inform the world and the country that Judge Robert Bork was a threat to the republic, all four of our freedoms, and all we hold dear.
Norm No. 2 was broken just three years later, when someone on the staff of the same Sen. Kennedy found a female associate of Judge Clarence Thomas who was willing to say he had impugned on her virtue in varying incidents. In its day, this drama and its mention of “Coke” and “pubic hair” was thought shocking. But 30 years on, the restraints have all fallen away.
In the age of Kavanaugh, Ted Cruz and his wife were beset by a mob when they went to a restaurant and had to be escorted home by police; swing vote Susan Collins received letters and calls expressing the hope that she and her staff would be raped and/or murdered. She was stalked late at night near her Washington residence and had her home in Maine quarantined and tested for ricin after a series of threats.
As Kavanaugh was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, protesters pushed police lines aside and pounded on the massive bronze doors of the court building. As Ryan Lovelace informs us in Search and Destroy, his book on the hearings, “Images of shrieking protesters slapping the doors and climbing into the lap of the marble statue Contemplation of Justice were broadcast on cable news throughout the day.”
All this seemed just fine with the Democrats — even the feminists, who had not one word of support for their colleague from Maine but a great deal of feeling for their ungainly witness and her breathy description of people and places that nobody else could recall.
Having tried twice to blindside a jurist whose ideas they opposed with a witness whose story lacked any accompanying evidence, the questions remain: “Will they try it a third time?” and “will anyone care if they do?”
In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan insists that they will because they believe in the “larger truth” of their claims, no matter what happens. But the rest of the world may tune them out. “Déjà vu all over,” they may say with the late Yogi Berra, or “There you go again,” as Ronald Reagan himself once proclaimed.
Meanwhile, they may come to miss all those norms that they shattered — as many or more than Trump himself managed to break.
