What are Democrats up to?

The House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Chairman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, is trying to revive the fight over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Nadler is trying to obtain, before their official release date, Kavanaugh’s emails from when he served in the Office of the White House Counsel and as President George W. Bush’s staff secretary.

Nadler’s interest in the early release of emails sent to Kavanaugh, even as carbon copies or blind carbon copies, hints at an unrestricted fishing expedition into Bush administration history. Everything in the office went through Kavanaugh, as Republican senators pointed out during the confirmation process.

There are few things political opponents would like more than attorney-client work product of the other party’s leaders, and Kavanaugh’s nomination gives Nadler an excuse to get it.

Or perhaps this could be an effort to suss out more about who knew what and when in 2003, when Republicans gained unauthorized access to Democrats’ emails on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealing evidence that the committee’s Democrats were blocking judicial nominees such as Miguel Estrada based on their race.

Democrats also think there’s a political win to be had here. Dragging Kavanaugh back onto the stage gives them a chance to wave their “War on Women” flag. Although the sexual assault charges against Kavanaugh ranged from the unsubstantiated to the absurd, Democrats saw a political gain from fighting the fight, and they want to do it again ahead of 2020.

But perhaps the best way to think of the Democrats’ latest effort is to recall Britain’s hanging of their own Adm. John Byng, as relayed in Voltaire’s Candide. Once in a while, it was explained, one needs to hang an admiral “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others).

The liberal groups who work on judicial appointments are intimately tied in with the leadership of the Democratic Party. They take a long view to the cultural and legal war they are waging.

That was why leftist groups have prioritized blocking black, Hispanic, and female conservatives from the lower federal courts: They fear such nominees would be harder to oppose further down the line in the bright light of a Supreme Court battle.

Also, part of the liberal groups’ strategy is that whenever they can’t win a nomination, they will inflict as much pain as possible. We’ve seen this consistently since Republicans took over the Senate after Harry Reid scrapped the filibuster for lower court nominations. They had little or no chance of defeating any Trump nominees while Republicans controlled the chamber, so they did their best to brand the nominees as extremists, attack their religion, and otherwise make their lives unpleasant.

This is why they want all Kavanaugh's old emails. It’s a means of imposing more pain on Kavanaugh, whose life and career Democrats tried to destroy during the 2018 confirmation hearings. Did he ever make any unkind jokes in an email or pass along a stray inappropriate message? Did embarrassing personal matters pop up in his work email?

The Left’s primary goal in judicial battles is to block any nonliberal nominees. The secondary goal is to ruin the life of the nominees.

Do that enough, and you send a message to other conservative legal scholars, attorneys, and state judges: Don’t even think of trying to get on the federal court. It’s not worth what we’re going to do to you.

There are plenty of reasons, it turns out, for Democrats to launch their Kavanaugh fishing expedition. All of them are despicable.