Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Shows Republicans’ Brutal Politics
Now the question will be whether the American people want to live like that.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine ultimately showed herself to be a creature of the Republican Party.
Photographer: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
The big two lessons of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation are that U.S. politics right now is party politics – and that the Republican Party has fully absorbed the style and principles of Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and other influences that tell it to never compromise and always exploit all short-term advantages as much as possible.
It’s impossible to understand the Kavanaugh fight without understanding that politics goes through the parties. That’s true on a personal level: Kavanaugh was personally close to and had worked with many prominent Republicans. The key ones were White House Counsel Don McGahn, who probably had more direct influence on selecting him than anyone else, and George W. Bush, who reportedly worked the phones hard to get him confirmed, with a special emphasis on talking with Susan Collins. Parties are (among other things) networks of individual partisans, and that means that within specialized areas – such as the top lawyers and the politicians who work with them – strong personal relationships develop. That helps a lot when things go wrong.