Sometimes you hear coaches complain about umpires or referees, that he or she thinks they're "bigger than the game." We can't act like we're bigger than the game. There's a danger of arrogance—for umpires, for referees, but also for judges. I would say that danger grows the more time you're on the bench. As one of my colleagues puts it, "You become more like yourself." And that can be a problem over time.

It's a persuasive case, I must admit. It stands to reason that if a prospective Supreme Court justice were to act as if he were entitled to confirmation by virtue of, among other things, his captaincy of his high school basketball team, and were to feel deeply wounded by the notion that he is not, and were to dismiss any lingering questions about his character with some fearmongering nonsense about an insidious left-wing conspiracy, Brett Kavanaugh would find such conduct very telling. After all, he'd reason, the longer one serves on the bench, the more their conduct reveals who they really are.

In the same speech, Kavanaugh—a lifelong Republican operative whose record as a Bush White House official, thanks to Mitch McConnell, remains largely obscured from the American public—somberly declared that a good judge cannot be a "political partisan" and must even "avoid any semblance" of partisanship in their work. Surely, Brett Kavanaugh would not approve of a candidate who asserts, without evidence, that people who want to know if he is a lying sexual predator are driven by "pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election," and by a pathological need to seek "revenge on behalf of the Clintons."

Perhaps the subject on which Kavanaugh's views are best known is the importance of being truthful—especially under oath. As a young Whitewater prosecutor, he adopted a famously absolutist position on how his colleagues should treat then-president Bill Clinton during their investigation of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. "What has especially convinced me of the appropriateness of obtaining his 'full and complete' testimony regarding the precise details of the relationship," wrote Kavanaugh to independent counsel Ken Starr, "are the sheer number of his wrongful acts." Kavanaugh explained that the president "has committed perjury (at least) in the Jones case," and "has lied to his aides [and] to the American people." He concluded: Clinton, under oath, "should be forced to account for all of that."

So then, if there were an astonishing volume of evidence that a judicial hopeful will lie and dissemble about anything, no matter how inconsequential the subject, in the name of political expedience—from his knowledge of partisan espionage to his drinking habits as a teenager to his high school yearbook—Brett Kavanaugh would be forced to conclude that the individual in question is not worthy of a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Good to know.