Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Saturday thanks to two coalitions of senators: a larger one, made up of men like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, for whom bestowing life tenure on an alleged sexual predator and confirmed serial liar is a more-than-fair price to pay for a 5-4 conservative majority, and a smaller one, led by Susan Collins and Jeff Flake and Joe Manchin, for whom abstaining from this disgraceful affair would have exceeded their capacity for moral courage.

One of the silliest and most persistent tropes of American politics is that the Supreme Court is a neutral, agnostic institution that operates above the messiness of Washington. (Many groups are fond of this lie, but the conservative movement, which has spent decades working to stock the bench to insure against its eroding electoral support, and the Republican Party, which stole Merrick Garland's seat from President Obama, tell it the loudest.) If the Court's makeup were not politically important—if its members were really objective arbiters of truth, rather than human beings with subjective beliefs—McConnell would never have done such an indefensible thing in the first place.

Kavanaugh's victory should put an end to this charade for good. When he takes the oath of office, he will become the Supreme Court's inaugural Republican justice.

This is not an official title. But Kavanaugh was not confirmed because he is a paradigm of moral virtue, as evidenced by the multiple credible accusations against him, and the casual misogyny in which we now know he trafficked. He was not confirmed because of his honesty, as evidenced by his near-constant dissembling over the past two weeks, and also for decades before that. He certainly wasn't confirmed because of his demeanor, as evidenced by the public tantrum he threw last week when he felt the prize slipping from his grasp.

Instead, Brett Kavanaugh is an associate justice of the Supreme Court because at the moment when his candidacy seemed most in doubt, he abandoned any pretense of neutrality and fully embraced the playbook of the modern Republican Party, of which he has been a member his whole life: lie, attack, complain, and attack some more. "What goes around, comes around," he warned. Make yourself the victim, and dismiss questions about your character as biased, hypocritical bullshit. Whatever you do, never say you're sorry for anything. This—whatever "this" is—is not your fault.

The Kavanaugh Investigation Is a Sham, and Republicans All Know It An exercise in political cover.

Donald Trump is the leader of his party and President of the United States because he is better than anyone else at doing these things. Legislators who once cultivated reputations as sober, even-handed, reasonable policymakers—realizing that moderate conservatism, to the extent that it ever existed, has no future in the GOP—have followed suit. Brett Kavanaugh, a vocal and unapologetic party operative up until the moment his old boss, George W. Bush, put him on the bench in 2006, is just following in their footsteps.

He doesn't think so. Or, at least, he doesn't want this to be the case. On Thursday, in an Onion-esque Wall Street Journal op-ed—"I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge"—he tried to distance himself from the guy who was shouting at the Senate Judiciary Committee last week about diabolical liberals seeking "revenge on behalf of the Clintons." (Also, nothing says "I am not a right-wing hack" like publishing in the WSJ opinion section.) In it, he trotted out every vague, West Wing-ish platitude about an unbiased judiciary you would expect to hear from a man who has a vested interest in convincing you that he is something he is not.