Why did President Trump choose a Beltway-born-and-bred creature of the GOP establishment when he could have nominated an outsider who would have caused heart attacks on the Left?
Look to Alabama, and the special election that took place this past Spring. Republicans lost a seat in the Senate, their minority was shrunk to the breadth of a hair, and Trump may have felt he had little choice than pick the safer pick rather than the bolder one.
Don’t misunderstand me. Kavanaugh is a principled jurist who moves the court to the Right. At the same time though, the new nominee is a bit of a question mark. Up until the hour it became politically costly to debate the ideology of this judge from the D.C. Circuit, conservatives had good-faith arguments about his opinions on everything from Chevron deference to Obamacare. Most importantly, both the Right and the Left wondered about his position on Roe v. Wade.
It is a compliment and not a sneer to say, as the president has, that Kavanaugh is a judge’s judge. Kavanaugh is not, however, Amy Coney Barrett, the female justice with seven children, with a “[loudly living dogma],” and with a finger on the trigger ready to end Roe.
[More: Twitter erupts after Trump nominates Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court]
Though ideological questions continue, political ones are beginning to disappear after the nomination. Trump has weighed the odds and Trump has selected the nominee best suited to getting through the Senate. A fine jurist, to be sure, Kavanaugh is a pragmatic political selection, all the same.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — who will perhaps enjoy redemption and subsequent sainthood in conservative circles for saving the Supreme Court — reportedly told Trump that Barrett didn’t have as good of a shot of getting through the Senate because of her allegedly obnoxious views about abortion. But Kavanaugh, a Kennedy protege, has a chance of charming Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, who support Roe v. Wade.
Kavanaugh ought not be begrudged. He ought to be publicly supported and quietly doubted. A generation only enjoys so many opportunities to overturn the sin of snuffing out unborn lives. Unless Trump gets a third pick, the current court will be the one to decide whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned, which brings us back to evangelicals, Alabama, and a multi-layered political provocateur. Some are already placing blame.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was the one who quite literally prophesied that McConnell and the establishment’s end day was coming. Down in Alabama he whipped the evangelical electorate into a furor and helped them cast off incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, a Republican, in favor of the unproven and untested Moore. A Democrat won the seat instead, the rest is history, and the rest is the reason why the current margins in the Senate stand at 51-49.
Had that not happened, had Strange with all of his flaws been the GOP nominee in that Senate special election, he likely would have won. And if the Senate was 52-48 in Republican favor, perhaps Trump would have risked it all on Barrett. Those margins are theoretical, of course, because in a fit of populist rage a Southern electorate voted for someone anti-establishment.
Should Kavanaugh end up a squish on the Supreme Court, blame ought to be on the head of Steve Bannon.
