Facebook Friend Jake Jacobs:

Oh, the difference a day makes. On Friday, Sept. 28, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee faced off against one another with some uncivil words and tense moments. That Saturday two of the members, from opposite political parties were on stage talking about bipartisan leadership.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) attended the Global Citizen Festival in New York City with Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) with the stated goal of bringing bipartisan support on foreign aid. Sen. Flake attempted to win over the predominately leftwing audience, saying people should “ feel free to join me in an elevator any time.” Expecting a rapturous response of love and affection, the senator was instead met with thousands of boos and declarations of “f— you.”

Sen. Flake made the fatal error of not understanding his audience. Under the guise of eradicating poverty by 2030, the Global Citizen Festival is “designed to make the U.N. into a world government to manage a transition to a new worldwide economic system.” This is a system of global socialism that calls for the redistribution of wealth in the United States to the rest of the world. Any true conservative would not associate with such an organization.

This is not the first time Sen. Flake has been manipulated by radical lefties, and not even in the most recent history. About 24 hours prior, Sen. Flake was cornered in a congressional elevator by two feminist activists, who verbally harassed him, yelling “Look at me when I’m talking to you! You are telling me that my assault doesn’t matter… Don’t look away from me. Look at me!” Shortly thereafter Sen. Flake said that unless there is a FBI investigation he would not vote for the moving out of committee to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh as the next Supreme Court justice.

The two radical activists who attacked Flake were Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher. Archila, who had been in Washington the previous week to participate in protests against Kavanaugh, is the co-executive director of the radical leftwing Center for Popular Democracy. Gallagher is an activist with the group. As with other groups involved in attacks on President Trump and Judge Kavanaugh, the Center for Popular Democracy is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a society hell bent on destroying President Trump and the conservative political agenda. It is clear the necessity for Americans to take seriously the aggressive, militant, and violent nature of leftwing politics in the country today. They have no respect for the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, which calls for the protection of peaceful speech and assembly. The Left hates Kavanaugh’s conservative constitutional originalism which puts into jeopardy their progressive agenda.

Through rude, crude, and violent means they attempt to stop speeches, interrupt congressional committees, and disrupt peaceful assemblies. They attack private lives in homes, restaurants, grocery stores, sporting events, and airports.

Due to vociferous protests by graduates of Harvard Law School, Judge Kavanaugh has decided that in the interest of keeping the peace at his alma mater he would no longer teach a winter course he planned. Georgetown Prof. Christine Fair went on “an unhinged tirade” on Twitter, where she called for supporters of Kavanaugh, especially the white men, to be murdered and castrated.

Following USA Today’s insinuation that Kavanaugh was a pedophile who should stay away from children, Illinois Times cartoonist Chris Britt published a wicked cartoon that mocked Kavanaugh’s 10-year-old daughter for praying for Christine Blasey Ford. In the cartoon, titled “Kavanaugh’s Daughter Says Another Prayer,” his daughter is seen asking God to forgive her “angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr. Ford.”

Castrated corpses fed to swine. Charges of pedophilia. Gang raping. Alcoholic father. This leftwing Democrat diatribe is not only a sad commentary on the evil nature of their political worldview today, but it is a harbinger of worse yet to come, and should serve as a wakeup call for those who love America, decency, and liberty.

Flake, by the way, voted for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. So did …

Gettysburg College Prof. Joseph Guelzo:

The nine long faces that stare back in photographs of the U.S. Supreme Court radiate a sobriety intended to convince us that it is a bastion of deliberation, reason and uprightness, walled off from the messy business of politics. Nothing has done more to turn that perception upside-down than the past two weeks of sound and fury over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Perhaps the perception itself has been part of the problem. From the beginning, the Supreme Court was much more of a political cockpit than the legend of jurisprudential neutrality suggests. John Marshall, the most significant chief justice in the court’s history, was appointed by President John Adams in the dying weeks of Adams’s administration specifically to discomfit the incoming president, Thomas Jefferson. Marshall did so by asserting the court’s power to review federal legislation and giving Jefferson’s nemesis, Aaron Burr, a free pass at his treason trial in 1807.

The courts were notoriously politicized in the fight over slavery. The Judiciary Acts of 1789 and 1837 both required that as new states were admitted to the Union, new federal judicial districts be created for them. If those new states were slave states, pro-slavery jurists from them became candidates for the Supreme Court. By the 1850s, the Supreme Court was composed of “five slaveholders and two or three doughfaces,” in the words of Horace Greeley.

Not much has changed in the last half-century of culture wars. The 1969 nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell both foundered on civil-rights politics. Robert Bork went aground on both civil rights and Roe v. Wade—which was itself the product of considerable political jockeying among the justices on the court at that time. Anyone who imagines that the Supreme Court floats serenely above the political fray knows little of its history. The Kavanaugh fight was just another turn of the screw.

When President Trump nominated Judge Kavanaugh in July to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat, the consensus among the wise heads was that the president had played it safe. Judge Kavanaugh was a carefully vetted Kennedy protégé with a sterling reputation and a long history of inside-the-Beltway service. The liberal Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar wrote that the nomination was Mr. Trump’s “classiest move” yet.

What turned Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process into the biggest judicial firestorm in decades had little to do with Judge Kavanaugh and a lot to do with Democrats’s overconfidence that his nomination could be turned into a Republican Waterloo. Driven by the conviction that they were riding a big blue wave to the November shore, Democrats laid into Judge Kavanaugh in the hope that something about the nominee could be confected into a seismic rumble and turn the wave into a tsunami.

They did not find much. Although Judge Kavanaugh generated baskets upon baskets of documents during his years in the Bush White House, they contained little that set political pulses fluttering. Ditto for his decisions on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which were routinely very conservative but largely concerned out-of-the-spotlight issues such as environmental regulation and due process. Of the 14 Kavanaugh opinions later reviewed by the Supreme Court, 13 were upheld.

It was not until a sensational sexual-assault allegation lodged by Christine Blasey Ford was made public in mid-September that the Kavanaugh confirmation appeared to be in any danger, and even then, the charge had the uncomfortable appearance of a Democratic Hail Mary play. The case did not grow stronger over the 10 days that followed Ms. Ford’s first public statement. Purported participants or witnesses denied recollection of any assault or of even being present at the party Ms. Ford described.

In their testimonies last week, both Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Ford had some pinholes pricked through their testimonies: he about his wild student life at Georgetown Prep and Yale, she about factual inconsistencies and potential political motivations. But by the end Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the Judiciary Committee Democrats were left without a meaningful case. Judge Kavanaugh might have gone on to a swift confirmation vote had it not been for the last-minute insistence of Sen. Jeff Flake on an additional FBI investigation into the Ford allegations.

I have undergone an FBI investigation. In my case, it was for a relatively harmless executive appointment. While it might sound like a forbidding exercise in mystery noir, the reality was nearly as humdrum as a mail delivery. Calls for an investigation arose less from a genuine effort to uncover the truth about a 1982 teen drinking party than from a desire simply to delay the vote. But with the submission of the FBI report, nods of approval from Sens. Flake and Joe Manchin, and Sen. Susan Collins’s powerful speech Friday announcing her support for Judge Kavanaugh, the last obstacles to confirmation evaporated. The Democrats spent a lot of credibility over seven days, but they didn’t get anything in return except the opportunity to grandstand.

If Sen. Feinstein was convinced that Ms. Ford’s allegations were serious, she should have shared them with the Judiciary Committee or law enforcement when they first came to her attention weeks earlier. That hesitation—and then the demand for a delay to conduct an FBI investigation—have combined to make Mrs. Feinstein look uncertain and perhaps unscrupulous. Judge Kavanaugh’s critics did not make themselves look better by turning on the FBI itself when it did not find what they wanted, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal making the McCarthyesque claim that it “smacks of a coverup.” Ms. Feinstein herself said “the most notable part of this report is what’s not in it,” suggesting (again) that she has access to some secret knowledge about the case that she won’t share.

Democrats have also cited Judge Kavanaugh’s angry testimony denying sexual assault as itself disqualifying—as if he had no business crying out while being stretched on the rack. He might not have been as deferential to the senators as norms of judicial gravitas would dictate, but he was certainly more poised than his inquisitors. In the end, even that line of attack accomplished nothing.

This process has inflicted real damage to Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Ford—enough to make any intelligent citizen wonder if it would ever be worth entering public service. But the most immediate casualty is likely to be the much-hyped November blue wave. If a vote for a Democratic majority in the Senate is a vote for the tactics of Sen. Feinstein, or for the boorish behavior of Sens. Blumenthal, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, then that vote may not materialize at all.

In the Missouri Senate race, Republican Josh Hawley has overtaken incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, largely in reaction to the Kavanaugh hearings. In North Dakota, Republican Kevin Cramer has opened up a yawning lead over Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. The newest Quinnipiac and NPR/PBS NewsHour polls show that the Democratic generic-ballot advantage has halved and the party’s enthusiasm advantage has vanished.

Napoleon counted on offensive bluster at Waterloo to give him victory, and it failed. By amplifying the politicization of the judiciary, Democrats may have achieved a Waterloo—but not the one they imagined.

The Wall Street Journal:

Donald Trump didn’t help Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation with his crude mockery of Christine Blasey Ford on Tuesday night in Mississippi, but then this Supreme Court moshpit isn’t about this President. The left’s all-out assault on the judge is clarifying because it shows that the “resistance” is really about anything and everything conservative in America. Mr. Trump is its foil to regain power.

Brett Kavanaugh isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s New York menagerie, or some Steve Bannon insurgent. The judge is the epitome of the GOP legal establishment, a Supreme Court nominee from central casting. He went to the best schools and served his apprenticeship among legal elites including a clerkship with former Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer. He served at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House staff in positions of great trust. On the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, he has written more than 300 opinions and had at least 10 adopted by the Supreme Court. He has taught at Harvard Law School at the invitation of then dean, and now Justice, Elena Kagan.

With these credentials Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. He could have been Jeb Bush’s nominee, or John Kasich’s, though Mr. Kasich in the ambitious ebb of his career now tilts with the anti-conservative left against Mr. Kavanaugh. In 2012 the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh would have been Mitt Romney’s “most likely first nominee” for the High Court. Mr. Toobin, who loathes conservatives, meant it as a warning.

***
Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.

Yet this is precisely why Democrats and the left have set out to destroy Judge Kavanaugh—not in legal philosophy or competence, which they knew was a political loser, but as a human being, a spouse and father. They need to destroy him personally with accusations but no corroboration, as they tried with Clarence Thomas, so they can deny the open Supreme Court seat to a judicial conservative.

So much the better if playing the #MeToo card also helps Democrats retake Congress. In this sense too, Mr. Trump is the left’s foil, though the Kavanaugh fight has usefully exposed the dishonesty of the loud worries about Mr. Trump’s threat to “democratic norms.”

Democrats were so worried about Senate norms that they hid Ms. Ford’s name from Republicans for six weeks, found her a lawyer, midwifed a lie detector test whose results they still haven’t fully disclosed, and then orchestrated the rollout of her accusations. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is too often divisive and dissembling, but no action in his Presidency comes close to matching the partisan viciousness of the Senate ambush of Brett Kavanaugh. These are today’s Democratic norms.

The other Democratic targets here are Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the conservative GOP majorities in Congress that have cut taxes, eased crushing regulations and confirmed a record number of appellate judges. Democrats claim to want to be a “check” on Mr. Trump, but good luck with that.

Their real goal is to retake Capitol Hill, roll back tax reform, expand the entitlement state, taunt Mr. Trump like a dancing bear, and set up 2020 for a return of the Obama agenda under the identity-politics leadership of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

***
The media sometimes profess to be puzzled that more than 80% of Republicans across the country tell pollsters they support Mr. Trump despite his personal flaws. The Never Conservatives are the reason, and the assault on Judge Kavanaugh is the latest showcase of their methods. Republicans have figured out that if the left can willfully, even gleefully, destroy a man as distinguished as Brett Kavanaugh, they can and will do it to any conservative who threatens their grip on power.

Republicans are well aware of Mr. Trump’s excesses and falsehoods. But they have also come to understand that the resistance to him isn’t rooted in principle or some august call to superior character. They know Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her history of deceit. Voters know this is about the left’s will to power by any means necessary.

Republicans across America can see, and certainly their Senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.