You know, I'm starting to wonder if Brett Kavanaugh was playing it straight when he talked about what an impartial, disinterested Supreme Court justice he's going to be. I mean, what the hell is going on here? From The Washington Examiner:

The ceremony follows perhaps the most contentious confirmation battle for a Supreme Court nominee in history and the administration is using Monday evening to show voters they can make good on its promises. In front of a room full of reporters, television cameras and Republican lawmakers at 7:00 p.m. Monday, the president will stand next to Kavanaugh and present him to the nation as one of the crowning achievements of his first two years in office.

In other words, a sitting Supreme Court justice—Kavanaugh already was sworn in on Saturday by the person who was supposed to do it, Chief Justice John Roberts—is going to participate willingly in a meaningless masquerade of a partisan campaign event. (We'll leave how disgusting it is that anyone besides Fox is going to televise this puppet show for another time.) Worse, it is a meaningless masquerade of a partisan campaign event that implies that a Supreme Court justice must be "sworn in" by the head of the Executive Branch, which, at the moment, is headed by someone as ill-suited to that office as Kavanaugh is to his.

If Kavanaugh was as dedicated to a non-partisan, independent judiciary as he claims to be, he'd have told the president*, politely, how completely unseemly this spectacle is. I'm telling you, I'm starting to wonder.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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