Editorial: Kavanaugh Needs No Defense

The Weekly Standard reports:

Every time a conservative jurist is nominated to the Supreme Court, he’s accused of perpetrating some heinous deed or harboring some reprehensible opinion. Neil Gorsuch was a plagiarist. Sam Alito was a racist and a sexist. John Roberts supported abortion clinic bombers. Clarence Thomas liked to talk about weird sex to female subordinates. Robert Bork was one of the worst people who ever lived.

Brett Kavanaugh was subjected to some of the most mindlessly tendentious treatment we’ve ever witnessed in a Senate confirmation hearing. Particularly memorable was Cory Booker’s demand that Kavanaugh explain a 16-year-old email on racial profiling without telling Kavanaugh what the email said (Booker claimed he couldn’t release the email although he had been cleared to do so—then released it as though he were breaking Senate rules). Kamala Harris cleverly edited a video to make it sound as though he considered birth control and abortion-inducing drugs the same thing, then posted the video on Twitter and claimed Kavanaugh was “going after birth control.”

We thought, though, that Kavanaugh would escape the confirmation process without a full-on smear of his personal character. We should have known better.

If only he had the character of late Senator Ted Kennedy...