The Supreme Court’s weight may bend Kavanaugh’s views

Brett Kavanaugh’s rocky path to a Supreme Court seat leaves many questions unanswered. His accusers, and Democrats generally, view his arrival there as a minor doomsday. Republican sponsors view it as a major triumph. His judge-baiting sponsor, Donald Trump, sees it as a personal feather in his hat.

Who knows? But there are suggestive straws in this mighty wind. Kavanaugh’s injudicious rant, with his embittered suggestion that he was the victim of a conspiracy “on behalf of the Clintons” may signal a psychological quirk. As a principal writer of Ken Starr’s impeachment recommendation to the House 20 years ago, the younger Kavanaugh was red hot for Clinton’s ouster as a sex criminal — he had lied to a grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Might this former zeal for Clinton’s impeachment have been a compensatory, perhaps unconscious, echo of youthful misdeeds? The coincidence is suggestive.

A clear majority of the American public thought, and the Senate concluded at Clinton’s Senate trial, that fibbing about consensual sex was not a “high misdemeanor” of sufficient weight to justify distracting a president. Time has ratified that judgment. There is irony in Kavanaugh’s arrival at the Supreme Court that allowed Paula Jones’ civil complaint to proceed in the courts and thus led to impeachment — one of the court’s more foolish misjudgments.

As for the broader outlook, those who see the new justice’s advent as doomsday overlook Supreme Court custom and history. An estimated 80 to 90 percent of the court’s deliberations concern relatively non-political and technical issues. Justice Powell used to say that far from being a cockpit with robed Cains and Abels at one another’s throats, the Supreme Court functions more like a large law firm.

And justices evolve. It is said in Washington that “where you stand depends on where you sit,” and a striking instance is that of the late Harry Blackmun. He came to the court by Nixon’s appointment as one of the presumptively conservative “Minnesota twins” (the other being his sponsor, Chief Justice Burger). However, Blackmun, once seated, began to wander across the imagined left-right spectrum — first as the principal author of Roe v. Wade, permitting first-trimester abortion.

In his latter years Blackmun embraced a prime heresy of the judicial right and declared himself against capital punishment — as “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. A more remote example of the 1930s was Hugo Black, who as his confirmation was pending endured exposure by a Pittsburgh newspaper as a former Alabama Klansman. He survived to become with Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. among the court’s notable civil libertarians. It is hard to see in Kavanaugh the dimensions of a Black, or even a Blackmun. But the august trappings of the palace on Capitol Hill do stir second thoughts from time to time. Chief Justice John Roberts, whose judicial views are somewhere right of Ethelred the Redeless, defied oddsmakers when he voted — apparently for reasons more institutional than personal — to uphold a crucial provision of Obamacare. Sometimes, occupants of these coveted seats find personal prejudices shamed by the court’s majestic presence. We shall see.