HT: LC

Feeling blue about the Kavanaugh confirmation? Me, too. But let’s not join the goofs who keep saying that this is some sort of unprecedented act of naked partisanship. Let’s not listen to writers like this who call Justice Kavanaugh “patient zero” spreading “virulent political fevers” to a once-staid SCOTUS. We don’t have to dip far into SCOTUS history—we don’t even have to mention the words “Warren” or “Watergate”—to notice that Kavanaugh’s brand of bare-knuckled political judgeship has a long and ugly backstory.

The cars were different, but the anger was the same…

As I found over and over again in the research for my book about twentieth-century conservatism, SCOTUS debates have never been polite or gentlemanly. Just ask Earl Warren, a perennial punching bag for the Birchers and their conservative friends.

Chief Justice Warren might have been the most prominent, but he was far from the only lightning-rod of controversy in recent SCOTUS history. Fewer people these days might remember the trials and tribulations of Justice William O. “Wild Bill” Douglas.

Were the attacks on Justice Douglas temperate? Polite? Bi-partisan?

Consider the following: On the floor of the US House of Representatives, for example, future President Gerald Ford initiated impeachment proceedings against Justice Douglas on April 15, 1970. According to the New York Times, Representative Ford accused Douglas of writing “hard-core pornography,” of pushing “hippie-yippie style revolution.” Douglas, Ford charged, was connected to organized crime and deserved to be kicked to the curb due to Douglas’s connections “with some of the most unsavory and notorious elements in American society.”

Porn, gangsters, and hippie-yippies…

Not polite. Not bi-partisan. And, like more famous elements of the Nixon era, not at all disinterested. The New York Times speculated that the real reason for the impeachment proceedings against Justice Douglas was payback for Congressional rejections of other Nixon judicial appointees.

So I, for one, will continue to be bummed by the rancor and contumely expressed during the Kavanaugh hearings. I continue to feel dismayed by Mitch McConnell’s naked power-grab in the non-confirmation of Merrick Garland. I am outraged by the thought of a stolen SCOTUS majority and I will work to elect anti-Trump, anti-Kavanaugh representatives and senators.

But I can’t pretend that this sort of ugliness has not been part and parcel of SCOTUS politics for a long time.