Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement was a powerful riposte to the allegations of sexual assault leveled against him on Thursday by Christine Blasey Ford.
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Yet whatever happens with Kavanaugh’s nomination now, the federal judge must remember the greatest characteristic of any great judge: fidelity to logic and the law over the natural impulses of emotion. This matters because as Kavanaugh aptly noted in his statement, this story will not end with a nomination vote.
Whether motivated by an interest in the truth or an interest in burnishing their partisan credentials, Democratic senators have pledged to continue investigating Kavanaugh whether or not he reaches the Supreme Court. I suspect that investigation will go nowhere, but it seems certain that Kavanaugh will be dogged as long as he remains on either the Supreme Court bench or the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Kavanaugh must, however, be careful about allowing his righteous anger to define him. A good judge is necessarily a jurist who operates beyond the frenzy that now defines American political life. A good judge must be that judge because this republic is built not on people per se, but on people that serve the idealism of our great institutions. In the case of the judiciary, the republic is built on people who are servants of the law: of facts established and then applied to statutes and cases past. Not individuals who hold agendas beyond the cases before them. Not like, put plainly, some of the individuals who sat before Kavanaugh and Ford at their hearings.
This is not to say that Kavanaugh does not have good reason to hold big grudges. He does. But he must find his better self: the better self that has allowed him to rise to the pinnacle of the greatest justice system in the world. Kavanaugh should be defiant in defense of his name, but he must not be defined as an angry man. He must be defined by that which the established facts of his life suggests he knows best: fidelity to the law.
