Susan Collins's Kavanaugh speech diagnoses America's deepening division

When Collins finished, most Republican senators came by her desk to shake her hand or give her a hug.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has emerged during this process as a hero to the right after being regarded for years as an establishment sellout, called Collins’s speech one of the finest in his memory. He also once again blasted away at Kavanaugh’s accusers and the Democrats who sought to promote them.

“This is as close to McCarthyism as I hope we get in my lifetime,” Graham said.

Graham’s anger, which boiled over during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh, was based on a feeling that while Ford’s accusation was credible and deserved a hearing, there were other accusations that followed Ford’s that were far more flimsy and ultimately veered into baseless slander.

Collins, in her speech, echoed that view. She called allegations of Kavanaugh’s involvement with “gang rape” during his high school days “outlandish” and said this rumor — injected into the public conversation by an attention-seeking attorney who has spoken of running for president — was “a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our American consciousness.”

Collins said she hoped that the Kavanaugh fight would be the “rock bottom” of the judicial confirmation process, after “a steady decline for more than thirty years.”

But there is no reason to believe it will be.

“We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it,” wrote Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare, in a column for the Atlantic arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because the preponderance of the evidence, in his mind, “leans toward Ford.”

The story of how we got to this contentious and ugly place has many chapters to it. The most recent was written only 18 months ago when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in response to a decision by Democrats to refuse to allow a vote. At the time, Democrats were retaliating for McConnell’s refusal to give Obama’s choice in 2016 for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, a vote. And in 2016 McConnell had his own justification for blocking Garland, based on what he saw as Democratic sins of the past.

The tit-for-tat has gone on for decades, escalating over the past 15 years or so.

The losers of this fight are not Democrats or Republicans but the American people, especially minorities and those without power, for whom an independent and trusted judiciary is a crucial bulwark against abuses.

As Collins said in her speech, “It is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” The law is supposed to be a central protection against unfairness. But the Supreme Court may now be truly broken in that it is viewed as a political institution rather than a body where outcomes are decided by an agreed-upon set of rules.

“There’s no time for nuance; there is only time for war,” wrote Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. “So, war it will be for the foreseeable future.”

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