It took a few decades of the left playing the same games with confirmation battles, but finally the right figured out how to render those attacks worthless.
Amy Coney Barrett has not yet been confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by the U.S. Senate, but there is no question that her confirmation battle has gone much better than the one endured by Brett Kavanaugh and his supporters. The undervalued reason why is that Republicans and their voters are not wasting any time on dirty tricks from their opponents in the Senate and in the media. This confirmation was supposed to be apocalyptic. That’s what I predicted. One of the closing paragraphs of “Justice On Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court,” the book I wrote with Carrie Severino: Clearly, we were wrong. There are many reasons for that, and it’s worth looking at them. For one thing, the Democrats’ campaign messages regarding the global Coronavirus pandemic make it impossible to repeat their action tactics from the Kavanaugh hearings. While riots and mass protests are encouraged in the streets, there was no way to import paid activists to the committee hearings or to roam Senate hallways in costume. When the Kavanaugh hearings began, they were fueled by outbursts from Senators and their invited guests who disrupted the hearings. Hundreds of activists were arrested and bailed out of jail by a coordinated campaign focused on a theme of disruption. The Coronavirus made similar tactics impossible. Contra the early media narrative, the timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death didn’t help Democrats as much as they thought it would. If you remember, the main Democrat theme of the Kavanaugh confirmation battle was “delay, delay, delay.” They worked very hard to delay the opening of hearings by fighting to read the millions of papers that passed through Kavanaugh’s desk while he was staff secretary for President George W. Bush. Battles over paperwork dominated July and August, with hundreds of articles written about the process fights. Chuck Schumer and his allies did a photo op in front of a few empty boxes that were described as “missing records.” Schumer imposed a Democrat boycott of meetings with Kavanaugh, only relenting after weeks of trying to delay the opening of the confirmation hearings. If Democrats tried to delay the Kavanaugh hearings until past the mid-term elections, and came very close to succeeding, how much easier should it have been to delay Barrett’s confirmation vote until after the presidential election? One of the reasons the delay strategy failed for Democrats last time is because American voters started getting sick to death of what they were doing to the man.
