SUPREME AMBITION

Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover

By Ruth Marcus

Brett Kavanaugh had a confirmation hearing like none other, because of the extraordinary testimony of one woman. Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party decades earlier. “Brett got on top of me,” she said, and “began running his hands over my body and grinding his hips into me.” He groped her, she said, and tried to take her clothes off. When she yelled, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. “It was hard for me to breathe,” she said, “and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”

Blasey Ford’s testimony was precise and measured — and credible. Even many of Kavanaugh’s supporters thought it sounded the death knell for his nomination. On Fox News, the anchor Chris Wallace called her account “a disaster for the Republicans.” When Republican senators caucused, the mood was gloomy. “Almost all of us were saying, ‘It’s over,’” recalled Jeff Flake, then a senator from Arizona.

It was not over, of course, and today Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. How he overcame Blasey Ford’s testimony — and allegations of sexual misconduct from other witnesses — is the subject of “Supreme Ambition,” by Ruth Marcus, a deputy editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page. Marcus’s book is impressively reported, highly insightful and a rollicking good read. It also adds another dispiriting data point — as if one more were needed — that the American Republic is seriously ailing.