The message from the White House was: “‘Look, we like people that you like, we like judges that you think are capable and worthy successors.’ Kennedy even swore in Gorsuch, making him the first former Supreme Court clerk to serve alongside his former boss,” Hulse tells us. “Kennedy wanted to see himself succeeded by one of his own clerks.” In Kavanaugh, Kennedy got his wish. Trump was delighted with the power play games of his White House counsel. “We need more Republicans in 2018 and must ALWAYS hold the Supreme Court,” the president tweeted in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, is not a knee-jerk Trump critic. He actually credits Trump with “cutting through much of the high-minded malarkey about the neutrality of judges with a single tweet.” It is true that Supreme Court justices like to claim to be objective and nonpartisan, with ritual disclaimers in their confirmation hearings that they do not make law but merely interpret and apply it. This posturing is routinely undercut when justices predictably split along ideological lines on big cases involving hot-button social issues like abortion and affirmative action.

Still, as Hulse points out, there is a reason judges go to great lengths to appear impartial and neutral (and, of course, some truly try to be). The legitimacy of the court depends on a public perception that the justices are fair-minded referees in the political battles that break out between branches of government (Exhibit A: the constitutional crisis now erupting over enforcement of congressional subpoenas on the Trump administration). Democracy depends on customs and norms as well as written rules; civility and comity as well as up-or-down votes. Trashing the time-honored process for nominating and confirming justices can have unintended consequences.

Power can cut both ways. If and when the Democrats gain control, they will undoubtedly use the “nuclear solution” to ram a big-government liberal agenda through the Senate. In personnel as well as policy, the rule is live by the sword, die by the sword: The all-powerful Don McGahn was sacked by Trump for disloyalty when he evaded the president’s apparent bidding to obstruct justice. As a longtime Washington correspondent, Hulse is an expert guide through the machinations on Capitol Hill. He does not offer any revelations about Kavanaugh, searingly accused of sexual assault as a high school student. But he offers a telling scene of McGahn coaching Kavanaugh to push back, hard, against his congressional inquisitors. The tactic worked; Kavanaugh survived. But the spectacle was unedifying and, possibly, a harbinger of worse to come.