Donald Trump plays it safe with Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh's gold-plated resume The Yale grad will be another sturdy conservative, somewhere between Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Kavanaugh: I revere the Constitution After accepting President Trump's nomination to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh spoke about the Constitution.

After more than the usual buildup, orchestrated by a master of reality TV, President Trump has chosen his nominee for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Anthony Kennedy. And he’s playing it safe.

Trump’s pick, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is a graduate of Yale Law School, has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown, and served in President George W. Bush’s administration before being named to the Court of Appeals. Like Trump’s prior nominee, Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh has a gold-plated resume and Federalist Society credentials. And, also like Gorsuch, he’s a former law clerk to Justice Kennedy. (And he was hired to teach at Harvard Law School by then-Dean, now Justice, Elena Kagan).

Speaking after Trump’s announcement, Kavanaugh stressed lessons learned from his mother’s experience teaching in largely African-American high schools in the District of Columbia, and from her later experience going to law school and serving as a prosecutor, and his father’s night-school legal education and later law practice. He stressed judicial independence, and fidelity to statutes and the Constitution, interpreted as written, not as imagined.

Separation of powers doctrine

He stressed that the Constitution’s doctrine of separation of powers isn’t just a technicality, but supports individual liberty, and he noted that a majority of his clerks have been women. He stressed his daughters’ interest in reading and sports.

He pledged to keep an open mind in every case, and to support the rule of law.

But what kind of a Supreme Court justice will he make? And what can we say about the confirmation process?

With regard to the former, it’s likely that he will be another sturdy conservative, somewhere between Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts. Justices surprise the presidents who appoint them sometimes — President Dwight Eisenhower supposedly said that the two worst mistakes he ever made were the appointments of Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court — but they usually don’t. Kavanaugh has been a judge for a while, and is pretty much a known quantity.

Some conservatives would have preferred someone farther to the right, but realistically Kavanaugh fits Trump’s stated requirements for the court, and Kavanaugh is probably a safe pick, unlikely to pose any surprise problems in the confirmation process. As Republican lawyer/author Kurt Schlichter put it, “We couldn't lose. And with Kavanagh, we haven't.”

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That’s probably right. Kavanaugh will be a solid vote for constitutional fidelity and judicial restraint. Some firebrands might have preferred more of a . . . well, firebrand, but with midterm elections coming and a narrow majority, Trump wanted a solid pick, a Harvard/Yale guy who’s likely to sail through the confirmation process. And that’s what he got. Plus, on the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh has a strong record in support of the Second Amendment.

As for the confirmation process, well, Kavanaugh will sail through it unless Democrats get their way. Even before Trump had named his nominee, some Democrats were promising to oppose whoever he named. Democrats desperately need a win before the midterms, and many of them are spoiling for revenge after the Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama’s appointee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Brutal confirmation fight

As a lawyer messaged me on Facebook today, Kavanaugh will be Hitler, because whoever Trump nominated was going to be Hitler.

But, of course, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler, and the Democrats have been slinging the H-word around rather a lot for the past couple of years. When you have the hysteria turned up to 11 all the time, it has less traction when you need it. (As comedian Dennis Miller tweeted: “Just to keep things in perspective, or not, Trump could nominate either Amy Coney Barrett or Vladimir Putin tomorrow and the headlines would be exactly the same.” He’s not wrong).

Still, brace yourself for a lot of hysteria. But here’s a parting thought: If so much hangs on the appointment of a single person to the Supreme Court that it matters more than almost anything else in our politics, then maybe the Supreme Court matters too much. In a healthier republic, it would matter less.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.