Occam's Razor

Ugh! This is an appropriate word to describe yesterday’s dueling testimonies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, first by Christine Blasey Ford then by Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Yesterday will seem painfully familiar to those of us who remember Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Hill claimed that he sexually harassed her when he was in charge of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Yesterday’s dueling testimonies though were a lot worse. While Anita Hill gave convincing testimony, Blasey Ford gave more convincing and far more damaging testimony. Later, Kavanaugh embarrassed himself by blaming Democrats and various other shadowy boogeymen, or maybe that was boogey-women, for what he said were wholly incorrect allegations. He even cried. He egregiously displayed the exact lack of judicial temperament, sobriety and impartiality that we should expect from a justice.

Of course that probably won’t derail his confirmation, just as Anita Hill’s merely postponed Clarence Thomas’s. Trump sees Kavanaugh’s fighting as a good thing. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee simply want to move his nomination forward, which they did today, when the obvious thing to do was to dig further. Later today, perhaps due to a heated encounter with two women, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake convinced the Senate to wait a week before voting on his final confirmation so the FBI can conduct a quick investigation on these many allegations. That’s a small sign of progress, but one that probably won’t keep him off the Supreme Court.

In Clarence Thomas’s case, there was just one witness’s testimony. While lurid, it was not exactly part of a pattern. That’s not the case with Kavanaugh. Others have come forward and want to testify against him. One even signed a sworn affidavit that Kavanaugh was one of many men waiting outside a room where an inebriated and incapacitated woman was ravaged by many men when he was in college. Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge apparently liked those boozy times with Brett so much he wrote a book about it. For Kavanaugh to claim as he did yesterday that his drinking was never to excess is just laughable and arguably perjury, given so many people who were there who watched his behavior first hand and will testify otherwise.

You would think that no one would be nominated if they could not demonstrate not just sobriety, but a commitment to impartially interpreting the law. Impartiality would include finding for the defendant or plaintiff even if it contradicted your political leanings. There’s little of this in Kavanaugh’s record. He was picked because he demonstrated a sustained lack of impartiality, coming down repeatedly in a predictably conservative direction. Kavanaugh would not be the first; this tendency applies to nominees from both sides of the aisles. Arguably, Kavanaugh’s nomination is the most egregious case we’ve seen in living memory, sans Robert Bork’s nomination that was wisely rejected in 1987.

The Senate is more inclined to vote for impartial justices when the court’s liberal or conservative balance is not an issue. Curiously, Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland was precisely this sort of nominee, and he won bipartisan praise. Senate Republicans though simply refused to hold hearings. Given Justice Kennedy’s tendency to straddle both sides of the court, more justices like him on the court are desperately needed. Ideally the entire court would be truly nonpartisan. No president should dare nominate someone who didn’t have a history of balanced rulings.

Those days are thirty or more years in our past. It doesn’t look like they will be coming back, which is tragic. Yet this is exactly what we need from a functional Supreme Court. Justices that fairly uphold the law, even if these laws are perceived as unfair, encourages Congress to update these laws. It’s not the fault of those nominated to or serving on the bench, though. It’s the fault of presidents who nominate people without these sorts of sterling qualifications.

President Obama did a fair job of providing nominees like this, and Garland was probably his best pick in this vein. Kavanaugh’s nomination proves that Trump doesn’t care about the Supreme Court’s vital role to impartially render justice.

All we can do is hope that our next president will put the nation’s need for fair and honest jurisprudence first. For a change, maybe we should vote for a candidate that pledges to do this, so we can have a meaningful and useful justice system again. It’s quite clear that without it our nation is deeply disordered. Voters must do their part to restore a truly impartial judiciary.