The knife fight over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement

THE PARTIES to a civil war almost never agree on why it began—and the parties to America’s decades-old fight for control of the Supreme Court are no different.

For Republicans, the cause of the conflict is a Democratic Party that has tried to block conservative justices, starting with Robert Bork’s failed nomination in 1987, by underhand means. In attacking Bork’s opposition to civil-rights legislation, Ted Kennedy abandoned a bipartisan tradition of assessing judicial nominees on their qualifications, not their values; in airing allegations of sexual abuse against Clarence Thomas in 1991, Democrats allegedly took that a step further; ditto in the sorry case of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

Democrats consider this self-serving nonsense. They note that they supported Ronald Reagan’s alternative to Bork, Anthony Kennedy; and that their efforts to block Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh were unsuccessful. The median justice on the court has grown more conservative in recent decades—suggesting that if the Democrats are trying to sabotage its conservative drift, they are failing. They believe Republicans’ grievances are fuelled by undimmed rage at the court’s consequential liberal lean in the 1960s, and a related ambition to turn back the clock.

These positions have long been entrenched. Yet the conflict has been managed...

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