Kavanaugh’s Partisanship Alone Disqualifies Him

Conservative columnist Philip Klein argues that Democrats are “hypocrites” for saying that Brett Kavanaugh is too partisan for the Supreme Court. He has a couple of fair points — but overall, I don’t think his argument is sustainable.

First, the good points. Klein claims that it’s Democratic nominees, not Republican ones, who have moved in ideological lockstep over the years. What’s true here is that from Richard Nixon through George H.W. Bush, Republican presidents tended to nominate a mix of solid movement conservatives such as William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia with, well, others. Some of those “others” were moderate conservatives, such as Sandra Day O’Connor; some, such as David Souter, were outright liberals. Over time, however, conservative interest groups have come to dominate the process, and the last several choices have been solid movement conservatives, at least if we don’t count the ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers. (Justice Anthony Kennedy is to some extent a different story; in that case, Ronald Reagan wanted a movement conservative, but the Senate was too liberal to confirm anyone like that, and so Kennedy was chosen as a compromise candidate.)