TV justiceBrett Kavanaugh’s Fox News interview

ON THE evening of September 24th Brett and Ashley Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court and his wife, sat for a 30-minute interview on “The Story”, a talk and interview programme on Fox News. This is striking for two reasons. First, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president, not elected by the people. Yet this interview had the feeling of a campaign appearance, with the Kavanaughs pleading their cases to a far broader audience than their electorate, which is the United States Senate.

And second, the position of Supreme Court justice demands impartiality, or at the very least the plausible appearance of non-partisanship. As this newspaper’s recent briefing discussed, the court has turned increasingly partisan: for the first time in memory, all four of the court’s liberal justices were appointed by Democrats, and all four of its conservatives by Republicans. Yet all eight of those justices would surely bristle if you referred to them as “Democratic” or “Republican” judges. But here was Mr Kavanaugh, sitting down for an interview with one of the two most partisan networks on American television.

Some thought his interview might be aimed at the four Republican senators who are seen as wavering on his nomination (if the Democratic caucus votes no unanimously, Republicans can only afford two crossovers). Others posited that it was directed at Republican voters. Perhaps, having elected a pugilist president, they wanted to see some fight from his nominee, who has recently been accused of sexual misconduct by two women. Or perhaps the White House wanted to keep the gender gap in the mid-terms from growing beyond its already record levels: they wanted to show Republican women that the nominee was a decent family man.

If that was the aim, they succeeded. Mr Kavanaugh came off as stolid, unpolished, perhaps a little wooden. Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court justice who faced accusations of sexual misconduct 27 years ago, offered a smokescreen of blustery righteous indignation. Mr Kavanaugh, by contrast, offered specific, lawyerly denials throughout. He maintained that he neither sexually assaulted Christine Ford Blasey, who has accused him of assaulting her at a party when both were teenagers, nor exposed himself to Deborah  Ramirez, who claims he did so when they were students at Yale.  Nor, he said, did he ever attend a party like the one Ms Blasey described.

He repeated the phrase “fair process” numerous times—yet stopped short of approving an FBI investigation, as some Democrats have urged. He declined to be drawn when pressed on his attackers’ motives. He said that people who knew him throughout his life would find it “inconceivable that I could have done such a thing” as expose himself to Ms Ramirez, though in the New Yorker article that detailed Ms Ramirez's claims, his one-time roommate said it was quite conceivable. He maintained that he never consumed so much alcohol that his memory failed; though that does not mean that he never drank heavily, as he was rumoured to have done. He volunteered that he never had sex in high school, which neither distinguishes him from many other high-achieving legal minds nor disproves the allegations levied against him, of sexual assault and unwanted exposure. And he maintained that he has been “a good person” who has led “a good life”, though of course plenty of decent burghers have done awful things. On September 27th both he and Ms Blasey are scheduled to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee.