Donald Trump is not a normal president or, indeed, a normal person. But on Monday he did pick a normal conservative jurist to nominate to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.
There’s something reassuring, perhaps, for liberals in this boring pick, even if they disagree with Kavanaugh’s positions. Perhaps a “normal” pick is a sign that American politics and government might be able to return to some semblance of functional democracy.
Under this mindset, the problem is Trump. He is at the center of American norms slippage. If he changes America changes. But that effort to place Trump’s sheer aberrancy at the center of American public life — a trend I’ve dubbed normcore politics — suffers from critical weaknesses. The fact that Kavanaugh is normal underscores how real the risk is to democracy. It doesn’t mitigate it.
The attacks on norms that many fear will outlast Trump’s presidency started long before he took office. And Kavanaugh supports them. His positions pose an immediate threat to voting rights and democratic regulation of the economy. They validate the years-long sequence of norm-shredding maneuvers by Mitch McConnell and total abdication of congressional oversight responsibilities that have brought us to this point. Normal is as bad as not normal, or even worse.
But if you insist on viewing all of politics primarily through the lens of normal vs. not normal, you willfully blind yourself to the real threat.
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The norm-shattering blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination was “politics as usual” in the sense that it was unanimously agreed to by Republican Party senators. And the replacement of Anthony Kennedy by a much-more-conservative jurist who will substantially shift American public policy to the right is “politics as usual” in the sense that any Republican president would do the same.
Indeed, the entire Kavanaugh cycle from working for Ken Starr to working on the Bush v. Gore case to ensure that the popular vote loser would take office regardless to his ruling in favor of large-scale disenfranchisement in South Carolina is very normal.
More broadly, the Kavanaugh view that the Constitution grants powerless individuals little in terms of democratic participation but powerful interests much in terms of exemption from regulation is a very normal Federalist Society view.
But that’s exactly the problem. The American constitutional order is very robust against any effort by an eccentric madman to build a personalized dictatorship. But it’s very vulnerable to the efforts of a disciplined minority to entrench itself in power.
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A great many Republicans — including many in Congress and many of his own appointees — find this or that aspect of Trump’s conduct to be regrettable on one or more levels. But the party has, as a whole, made a collective and unanimous decision that they are all on the same team and fighting for the same cause. It’s a cause they’ve given up on securing majority support for, but believe can be effectively advanced through gerrymandering, filibusters, judicial review, vote suppression, cable news propaganda, etc. It’s high time to take them at their word that, all things considered, they think this is a good way to go.
Putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is very normal Republican politics, and that’s exactly the problem.
