Don't consider Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court until Mueller investigation is over Brett Kavanaugh was chosen for the Supreme Court to save Trump. His partisan history and permissive views on executive power make him a unique danger.

Jason Sattler | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Kavanaugh tours Hill as democrats call for delay Democrats are continuing their calls to delay the confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. They cite a lack of information and Michael Cohen linking the president to a federal crime as reasons to delay the hearings. (Aug. 23)

If Brett Kavanaugh cares about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, he must demand that his nomination be delayed immediately.

President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Anthony Kennedy may have the votes to be confirmed. But if that happens as currently planned, he'll permanently damage the institution he’s spent his life angling to join — unless he asks Senate Republicans to postpone his confirmation until the Mueller investigation is completed.

Legitimacy may not be something the party of Trump cares about now, as Republicans make a mad dash to suck up the spoils from electing the biggest popular vote loser to take office in 140 years. But they and the conservatives they’ve propelled to the nation’s top court may live to regret this.

The brakes should have been slammed on this nomination long before last Tuesday, when Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to crimes that all but directly implicated the president and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of eight felonies. Yet this bizarre moment in history gives the nominee a rare chance to show a loyalty to the Constitution and the country beyond the vague and useless testimony he’s likely to offer the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Worst possible nominee at worst possible time

Both Kavanaugh and the extraordinarily comprised man who nominated him require far more scrutiny than the rushed hearing set by committee chair Chuck Grassley to begin on Sept. 4. The replacement for Kennedy, the Court’s key “swing vote,” will be the most pivotal appointment to the Court in decades.

He will almost certainly join with the conservative majority to reverse or hollow Roe v. Wade, a decision that 71 percent of Americans and even a majority of Republicans support, according to a recent poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. But to be fair to Kavanaugh, this would be true of anyone Trump picks for the Court from his Federalist Society-approved list of nearly all white guys and a few white women picked especially for their ability and willingness to repeal Roe.

What makes Kavanaugh a unique danger at this unique moment is his Forrest Gump-like genius for popping up in nearly all of the Republican Party’s worst assaults on democracy during the last 25 years. Combine this with his extraordinarily permissive views on executive power that contrast directly with his personal role in persecuting a Democratic chief executive over issues that had little if anything to do with the presidency, and we have the worst possible nominee at the worst possible moment.

Kavanaugh worked with Kenneth Starr in the ponderous independent counsel fishing expedition that began looking into a land deal in Arkansas and culminated with an actual perjury trap involving President Bill Clinton’s unethical but not illegal affair with then intern Monica Lewinsky. The nominee then went on to become a White House Staff Secretary during the heyday of the George W. Bush administration’s lawlessness.

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I was denied coverage for birth control. Kavanaugh would make the problem worse.

Senate Democrats claim that their Republican colleagues seemed ready to ask for all of Kavanaugh’s White House records until a July 24, 2018, meeting with Trump officials. Now the Senate majority is rushing toward hearings determined to release a tiny percentage of the nominee’s paper trial at the White House to the public, in contrast to the about 99 percent that was released when Justice Elena Kagan, one of the last nominees to work in a similar capacity, was confirmed.

Why the sudden switch? Maybe it stems from Kavanaugh’s 2006 confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals when he insisted to the Senate that he’d only learned about that administration’s use torture and warrantless wiretapping from the newspaper. Sure, buddy.

But it’s Kavanaugh views of the presidency, especially a Republican presidency, that make his nomination even more heinous, given the potential legal perils confronting this president and his family. Put aside whether he thinks a president can be indicted. Kavanaugh suggested that he believes the landmark case, U.S. v. Nixon, that forced the president to turn over his tapes leading to the only presidential resignation in U.S. history, was wrongly decided. This is damning given the current president’s legal team's constant signaling that it would fight any subpoena to testify before the Mueller probe.

But what makes this nominee an even greater risk is the way Kavanaugh campaigned for this appointment with a series of speeches in 2017 designed to align himself with former Justices Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist in a way that elevated him to Trump’s list after not making the first two drafts.

Kavanaugh was chosen to help save Trump

So here’s a committed partisan with views on executive power that seem to allow him to permit almost anything from a Republican president, while probing the most intimate details of a Democrat’s cigar use, making a public case to a president, who is being investigated for two separate conspiracies that may have helped elect him president, conspiracies that this president spends much of his executive time trying to cover up.

The nominee may look at Neil Gorsuch, who slid into a seat Democrats widely consider stolen from Merrick Garland with one of the fewest votes of any confirmed justice since Clarence Thomas, who almost certainly committed perjury during his confirmation. And he may think that the only legitimacy that matters is 51 votes.

But Kavanaugh knows he was chosen to not only end Roe but to help save Trump. If he goes along with this plot against America, it will not only draw the entire nation to the question of the court’s legitimacy, it will signal that now everything is permitted.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of "The Sit and Spin Room" podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP.