Democrats are badly overplaying their hand against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
They look like vicious partisan hacks rather than public servants, all while raising the profile on the one topic (judges) that unites the otherwise fractious Trump-conservative-Republican coalition and energizes right-leaning voters.
President Trump has shown an ample proclivity to step on his own message and torpedo Republican candidates, if Democrats will just get out of the way. The Democratic “base” is energized anyway, and will remain so, and the more that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his cohorts put the focus on a fruitless fight against Kavanaugh, the less ability they will have to appeal to moderate or “swing” voters on issues where Democrats poll well.
As a conservative, I am delighted to see the Left play their politics this way, because I want to keep a Republican majority in the House and expand it in the Senate. Yet I think it is terrible for our political system when invective, histrionics, and smears against a superbly qualified judge and fine human being are seen as the norm for court nomination.
Republicans in the Senate have never, not once, tried to turn a Supreme Court nomination fight into a political Armageddon via character assaults and overheated rhetoric. They didn’t do it against Stephen Breyer, nor against Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They didn’t do it against Elena Kagan or even take a very strong cudgel against Sonia Sotomayor even though she offered plenty of opportunity with her comments about a “wise Latina” making a better judge specifically by virtue of her ethnicity and gender.
Yet here we have Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., saying that to vote for the mild-mannered Kavanaugh would make someone “complicit in the evil.” We have former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., saying “the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh will threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., fulminated that Kavanaugh would “radically reverse the course of American justice and democracy.” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., predicted a frightening “path toward tyranny.”
This is mindless, over-the-top, histrionic nonsense. And it’s horrendous for public discourse. It also takes away the Left’s ability to attract soccer moms and attitudinal centrists turned off by Trump’s own outrageous and mean-spirited assaults against any perceived adversaries, against the truth, and against common decency.
Trump, quite regrettably, has given the Left the moral high ground in terms of civil discourse — yet in their patently absurd attacks on Kavanaugh, the Left is giving that high ground right back. For a key percentage of voters, that moral high ground also is a political high ground, one which the Left relinquishes at its own peril.
If Democrats want to vote against Kavanaugh, fine. But they should, for their own political good, do so respectfully and honestly, not with character assassination. Kavanaugh will be confirmed either way. But the Democrats’ electoral advantage could explode if they raise their own political base’s temperature (and expectations) without the actual means to deliver victory in the nomination battle.
I’ll be happy with the electoral results of the Democrats’ political miscalculations. But the body politic will be the worse for it, with faith in our system further eroded and dangerous cultural animosity ratcheted up even further.
We all can do better than we’ve done in the past few years. Is it too much to ask that we start doing better with our conduct of the debate over Judge Kavanaugh?
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.
