“It is our job,” he wrote colleagues in Starr’s office in an email, “to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear-piece by painful piece.”Ĭan Kavanaugh and his supporters really be surprised that opponents of his nomination will feel similarly righteous in wanting to examine allegations against him piece by piece? At the time, however, he was filled with righteous indignation. With the benefit of hindsight, Kavanaugh later concluded presidents should be shielded from criminal investigations of the sort he helped wage against Clinton. Kavanaugh’s fate, too, now depends on precisely the same thing: Do the allegations change the calculation for the perhaps half-a-dozen senators-including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska-whose minds were not already made up by earlier political calculations? In his zeal at the time, Kavanaugh, like Starr, may have worked himself into a belief that this was about sacred principles of law, but to many others-and ultimately to a clear majority of the country-it was obvious that the case was fundamentally about political power. So here was Kavanaugh-who spent his early 30s as a Ken Starr warrior pursuing Bill Clinton for the political and legal implications of his most intimate moral failings-now in his early 50s facing a political crisis over disturbingly vivid, passionately contested, decades-old allegations about Kavanaugh’s own possible moral failings.įew prosecutors, it seems likely, would ever open an assault case-36 years later-on the basis of Christine Blasey Ford’s account of being pinned down on a bed by a drunken Kavanaugh, then 17, and being aggressively groped until a friend of his physically jumped in.īut few prosecutors in the 1990s would have pursued an extensive criminal investigation over perjury into a middle-aged man’s lies about adultery if that person had not been President Bill Clinton. Few people in American life witnessed at closer range than Kavanaugh the modern reality that when things really matter-in the way that the balance of the Supreme Court matters-all these fine notions matter less than the cold, hard exercise of power. Gore, and, at last and above all, over Donald Trump-have made the question virtually irrelevant.įairness is rooted in the idea of principles, precedent, proportionality. Three decades of remorseless ideological and cultural combat-over Robert Bork, over Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, over Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, over Bush v. After decades of competitive moralizing and situational ethics-in which every accuser in due course becomes the accused, and anyone riding a high horse can expect to be bucked off-even the concept of fairness in American politics seemingly is defunct. It is on this point that the cosmos may be having a laugh not just at Kavanaugh’s expense but at many other people’s.
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