Through a spokesperson, Kavanaugh declined to comment to The Washington Post on his musings, although the paper did obtain a quote from another Starr deputy, who asserted that Kavanaugh had "immediately regretted the tone of the memo," which he wrote while "sleep deprived." Given that he has now been a federal appellate judge for more than a decade, I hope Kavanaugh has developed a bedtime routine that does not interfere so seriously with his impartiality.

The nominee's expansive views on the limits of presidential power are relevant, of course, for a very practical reason: If confirmed, he may be the deciding vote in Mueller-adjacent cases that could come before the Supreme Court. (Trump's lawyers and Robert Mueller's team, for example, are negotiating ground rules for an interview even as you read this sentence.) If it were important to Donald Trump to nominate an individual who is, based on their judicial and academic record, most likely to determine that efforts to consolidate power in the executive branch pass statutory and/or constitutional muster, he could not have made a better choice.

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Trump Is Running the Government Like a Cheap Reality TV Show

This memorandum reveals something different about Kavanaugh that goes beyond the potential for him to absolve the man who appointed him of guilt. At the time, Kavanaugh was a young lawyer in the Office of the Independent Counsel, tasked with conducting what was supposed to be a nonpartisan inquiry that the Department of Justice, due to the obvious potential for conflicts of interest, could not be expected to complete. Yet his writing here is almost completely devoid of legal reasoning. (His oblique reference to perjury, for example, gives way to another half-page of sanctimonious harrumphing that includes, for good measure, a gratuitous Richard Nixon reference.) It does not recommend an interview strategy pursuant to any legitimate investigative goals. It is an explicit recommendation that Starr abuse his prosecutorial authority to exact revenge on a political opponent, and to force them from public office.

The GOP has long treated the federal judiciary as a political tool, praising its neutrality while also making it a priority to confirm only staunch ideologues on whose votes they can count—and to prevent Democrats, by any means necessary, from appointing anyone at all. The fact that someone like Brett Kavanaugh is now on the verge of a lifetime appointment is precisely the type of outcome they hope for. At a time when the GOP could use Supreme Court justices who are willing to inject their partisan leanings into their nonpartisan job duties, they found a man who saw an interview of a Democratic president not as a fact-finding tool, but instead as a plum opportunity to facilitate impeachment at the hands of a Republican-controlled Congress.

If asked about any of this during his confirmation hearings, he'll likely speak at length about his career transition from fighting in the political trenches to sitting on the federal bench, and extol the virtues of applying and interpreting the law without regard to who benefits from his decision-making process. This sounds nice, and it is the right thing to say. But he has always been, literally and figuratively, a Republican first.