The real Brett Kavanaugh emerges, showing he’s unfit for the court

Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices, left and right agree, are just a show. The nominee is cagey and evasive, the senators grandstand for the cameras, and we don’t get anything like a true picture of who the potential justice really is.

Until Thursday.

The extraordinary performance by Brett Kavanaugh was not just unusual; it may have been the most revealing testimony we’ve ever gotten from a Supreme Court nominee. If you wanted to know who this man really was, he sure showed you.

Everything that came before turned out to be either a partial and misleading snapshot or an outright attempt at deception. Now we’ve seen the real Kavanaugh in full. And what did we learn? Let’s see:

▪  Kavanaugh is an intense Republican partisan.

To be honest, I was surprised it took this long for this fact to become clear. In the past decade, I’ve heard people say numerous times that the guy Republicans would really love to have on the Supreme Court is Brett Kavanaugh, but he probably can’t be nominated because he’s known as too much of a partisan hack. He worked for Ken Starr, when he urged that President Bill Clinton be questioned in the most lurid way possible. He worked on the George W. Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida debacle. He worked in the Bush White House. He might have the qualifications, the argument went, but a hard-charging partisan like him would be too controversial.

On Thursday, no doubt realizing that the only way to save his nomination was to reinforce feelings of party loyalty among Republican senators, Kavanaugh not only came out swinging at Democrats, he made clear that he’s a Supreme Court nominee for the age of negative partisanship. I deserve to be on the court, he said in effect, because I hate Democrats as much as you do. This part of his testimony sounded like what you hear from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity:

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President [Donald] Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Read that and the other things he said about Democrats, combine it with his history as a Republican operative, and ask whether you think Kavanaugh will be “a neutral and impartial arbiter” when it comes to questions that come before the court. The very idea is absurd.

▪  Kavanaugh is angry, belligerent and unable to restrain his emotions.

Just look at the contrast between how Christine Blasey Ford conducted herself Thursday and the way Kavanaugh did. She’s been thrust into the spotlight; she’s been the target of vicious attacks and death threats; she’s had to move her family out of their home for their safety; she’s been called a liar and part of a conspiracy. And how did she act? With calmness, dignity and restraint.

How did Kavanaugh act? He shouted, he cried, he interrupted senators trying to ask him questions, he was rude and contemptuous and generally unhinged. At one point, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked him whether he had ever drunk so much that he forgot events that occurred - a highly relevant question given the allegations against him – and he replied, “I don’t know, have you?” like some kind of petulant teenager.

▪  Kavanaugh is dishonest.

Kavanaugh has lied and dissembled to the Judiciary Committee on numerous counts. He began his first round of testimony by saying, “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination” – an obvious lie. He claimed not to have known Democratic documents he trafficked in during previous judicial fights had been stolen, which badly strained credulity.

In Thursday’s hearing he kept it up. He repeatedly said that others had “refuted” Christine Ford’s account of her sexual assault, when that isn’t true – they only said they had no memory of it. He gave utterly ridiculous explanations of the multiple references in his yearbook to drinking and sexual boasting. A reference to “Devil’s Triangle,” a nickname for a threesome with two men and one woman? Nuh-uh, that’s “a drinking game,” like quarters. Right.

In the most despicable moment of the entire day, Kavanaugh was questioned about how he and his buddies had claimed in their yearbook entries to be “Renate alumni,” referring to a girl at a nearby school – an obvious attempt at sexual boasting and slut shaming. He not only claimed ludicrously that the references were there because they all valued her friendship so highly, but pretended to be outraged that a senator would even imply otherwise.