With the final glories of baseball season upon us, it’s apt Brett Kavanaugh would portray himself as America’s umpire — an impartial neutral calling balls and strikes wherever they happened to fall — as he seeks a seat on the United States Supreme Court. It’s a strategically sculpted metaphor for a nice guy, we’ve all been told, who drove his kids to school and coached one of his daughter’s basketball teams. It also misses the mark. Kavanaugh has been tossing spitballs and bean balls at the heads of opposing batters for much of his adult life as a trench warrior for Republican causes. He’s never been above the fray; he is the fray.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have a clearer picture of this by the end of this week’s confirmation circus. If we don’t, well, that won’t have been by accident.
We got the first glimmer of a real Kavanaugh Tuesday morning when a father of one of the kids killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this year reached out his hand to Kavanaugh. Umpire Kavanaugh showed the man his back and walked. In his judicial writings, Kavanaugh has made clear that if the Founding Fathers meant to outlaw weapons that can fire 20 rounds in the blink of an eye, they would have written it down. Their silence, he’s argued, speaks volumes.