Here's just a few of the more salient things that America still doesn't know about President Trump's Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh as the 53-year-old D.C. jurist's Senate confirmation hearings began Tuesday morning

Here's one thing we do know with absolute certainty: Kavanaugh was already — even before he delivered his opening statement — one of the most unpopular Supreme Court nominees in modern U.S. history. He's on a par with the right-wing extremist Robert Bork whose 1987 selection by Ronald Reagan was torpedoed not just by Democrats but by the now-extinct breed of moderate Republicans such as the late Pennsylvanian, Arlen Specter.

And yet, with almost equal certainty, we can expect that Kavanaugh — after a rushed hearing in which many key documents will remain hidden from senators and the American public — will be confirmed in time for the fall start of the High Court's next session to begin rewriting our law for the next three decades or more. And he'll do so with support from senators representing less than half of the population, very much comparable to Trump's less-than-plurality 2016 popular vote.

A deeply flawed, wildly unpopular judge getting confirmed in a kangaroo court of a confirmation hearing by a thin majority of mostly small-state senators, just two years after the Senate blackballed the legitimate nominee of a Democratic president? Is this any way to run a democracy?