Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court has prompted not only exuberance and anger but also a kind of hazy worry in some corners that the circumstances of his ascension will call the Court’s legitimacy into doubt.
The truth is it’s about time. The one upside to putting a person on the bench whose dishonesty and (literal and metaphorical) intemperance has been on such flagrant display is that it could prompt a sorely needed reckoning with the larger issue of the Court’s mostly pernicious role in American public affairs.
For the past 25 years, the judiciary has moved increasingly further right and the Supreme Court has tossed out duly enacted legislation, opened the floodgates to public corruption, and undermined substantive democracy. The public has largely missed this bigger picture because the American progressive movement has focused attention on the role of Court in protecting abortion rights.
Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate remedy to this problem, but the first step is to recognize it exists. And there’s no better face for an increasingly radical and anti-democratic Supreme Court than the ruddy, yelling visage of Brett Kavanaugh.
