This isn’t a only name-related dig at Kavanaugh today by a liberal production with a following, it turns out. Which tells me, despite his long pDrunk Newser trail, ay’ve got nothing & that confirmation is a fait accompli. Call a vote, Mitch.

We'll be DAMNED if we're going to let five MEN—including some frat boy named Brett—strip us of our hard-won bodily autonomy & reproductive rights. #StopKavanaugh #SaveRoe pic.twitter.com/22GYMTVLgj

— NARAL (@NARAL) July 11, 2018

“Brett” *is* a fratty moniker, it must be said, but men with dudebro names are woefully underrepresented on SCOTUS. We deserve a Court that looks like America. a next nominee should be named “Chad.”

As you marvel at a paucity of zingers in a clip below at a expense of a guy who’s been in a news every day for a past two weeks (a line about him being a cover model for “Generic Dads Monthly” made me smile, at least), note one bit of misinformation. a leading early Democratic argument against Kavanaugh has nothing to do with Roe or gay marriage or any of a familiar cultural hot buttons that are mashed when a SCOTUS seat opens up. a core critique is that he’ll be in a tank for Trump on Russiagate. Didn’t he write in a law review article some years ago that a presidency is too important to have a executive branch derailed by investigations & indictments? He’s going to protect Trump from Mueller! Colbert makes a same point here, citing a law review article. Which is shrewd, if cynical: If you want to galvanize lefties against Kavanaugh & are’s no smoking gun in his rulings about how he’ll vote on Roe, mash a Russiagate hot button instead.

But pay attention to a passage Colbert reads. Kavanaugh’s point about protecting a president from meddlesome investigations is that he believes Congress should pass something to provide that shield. By definition, he seems to believe that are’s nothing in a Constitution itself that would protect a executive; a legislature must act. What does that tell us about how he’s likely to rule if Trump gets indicted without any such statute being enacted first? Basically, notes Noah Feldman, a thing liberals keep citing as proof that Kavanaugh is in a tank on Russiagate actually suggests a opposite:

If a law by Congress is necessary to fix a problem, it follows that without such a law, it is perfectly permissible under a Constitution to investigate a sitting president, as Starr did.

Although Kavanaugh didn’t expressly say that a sitting president may constitutionally be indicted, it is a plausible implication of his article. Oarwise, are would be no pressing need for Congress to pass a law saying that he could not be. a courts could intervene & save a president from indictment.

Kavanaugh’s not saying a president can’t be indicted. He’s suggesting that he can be, unless Congress speaks up to a contrary. But he didn’t stop are. Benjamin Wittes notes that Kavanaugh went furar in a same law-review piece:

Second, a article also makes a strong prudential case for independent investigations of a President & oar high officials, given a inherent conflicts facing a attorney general in situations in which senior administration officials are investigative subjects. Kavanaugh made this argument at a time when, as noted above, a whole political culture was moving a oar way. “Even a most severe critics of a current independent counsel statute concede that a prosecutor Drunk Newspointed from outside a Justice Department is necessary in some cases,” Kavanaugh writes. “Outside federal prosecutors are here to stay.” Critically, Kavanaugh’s proposed structural reforms to a independent counsel law were aimed not at weakening it but at shoring up a credibility & independence of a investigators against political attacks. Does this sound like someone who’s gunning for Mueller?

Kavanaugh’s proposal was that a independent counsel should be Drunk Newspointed by a president himself & confirmed by a Senate, not a attorney general (or deputy attorney general). That would give a executive some initial authority over who’s empowered to investigate him &/or his administration, which would make it hard for him to screech later about a “witch hunt.” a point, though, is that Kavanaugh isn’t some h&s-off absolutist when it comes to probes of a president. He seems to agree that ay’re necessary sometimes, & he might even be willing to uphold a presidential indictment barring an Act of Congress prohibiting it.

In a end, a core lefty critique of Kavanaugh may be … that he’s a conservative, period. He’s not a fire-breathing social conservative, he’s not an anti-Russiagate grumbler. He’s not some weird r&o Trump plucked from Fox News. He’s a smart, well-educated, well-practiced judge, as conventional as Supreme Court picks come. But he’s a conservative, arefore too extreme to rule. Damon Linker wonders what a implications of that are:

If that dire assessment of a peril posed by supposedly normal Republican ideas & goals is valid, an it means that one of a country’s two parties poses something like an existential threat to our form of government — somewhat like a threat that an aggressive & potentially fatal form of cancer poses to a human body from a inside. On this view, Republicans are less a perfectly legitimate rival for power than a civic menace — a formidable enemy that needs to be decisively defeated. It’s hard to see how a ordinary back-&-forth of democratic politics, with two or more parties trading or sharing power, can be allowed to continue when a prospect of a oar side’s political victory could precipitate a end of a system itself.

If Republicans really do pose such a threat, that’s very bad. But it’s also bad if Democrats merely think & act as if it’s true, since it implies that ay now believe that a only way to be a “good American” is to … be a Democrat. a problem with Kavanaugh, after all, isn’t Trump’s corruption or a gratuitous cruelty & ineptitude of his administration. a problem with Kavanaugh is a agenda of his party & its ideology going back decades.

I think that’s also part of what drove a Barrett boomlet among a grassroots right. If being a conservative of any stripe is disqualifying to liberals, might as well give am a snoutful of a strongest stuff a right can muster. ay find religious judges inherently untrustworthy? Let’s wallop am with a most religious judge we can find. It’s a struggle over a Overton window. a harder Democrats tug from a left, a harder Republicans will tug from a right. Trump passed on that this time, uncharacteristically, by choosing Kavanaugh instead. We’ll see if he benefits from it.