Editorials of The Times

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, as much as any development in the challenging era of President Donald Trump, is testing the United States' politicians and its civic institutions. Few, so far, have met the test.

Not Republican senators, who, after denying one president his legitimate authority to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court, are now rushing their own nominee through, uninterested in the truth, while weeping crocodile tears about other people’s partisanship.

Not Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who tainted the process by bringing forward damaging allegations against Kavanaugh only at the last minute.

Not the FBI, which either of its own volition or because of constraints imposed by Republicans failed to interview many of the key witnesses who could speak to the accusations against Kavanaugh.

And not Trump, to absolutely no one’s surprise.

In this crucible of power politics, of bullying and posturing and rage, no one has been more severely tested than Kavanaugh. If he believes himself innocent of sexual assault — if he is innocent of sexual assault — the test, to him, can only appear monstrous.

Yet unfair as the test might seem to the judge and his supporters, senators who want to preserve the credibility of the Supreme Court cannot now look away from the result: Kavanaugh failed, decisively.

How? First, he gave misleading answers under oath. Judges — particularly Supreme Court justices — must have, and be seen as having, unimpeachable integrity. The knuckleheaded mistakes of a young person — drinking too much, writing offensive things in a high school yearbook — should not in themselves be bars to high office. But deliberately misleading senators about them during a confirmation process has to be. If Kavanaugh will lie about small things, won’t he lie about big ones as well?

Indeed he already has: During the course of his confirmation hearings, he claimed, implausibly, that he was not aware that files he received from a Senate staff member, some labeled “highly confidential” or “intel,” had been stolen from Democratic computers.

Even the small lies, of course, aren’t so small in context, since they relate to drinking or sex and thus prop up his choir-boy-who-indulged-now-and-then defense.

Second, confronted with the accusations against him, Kavanaugh made recourse not to reason and methodical process, but to fury and the rawest partisanship. Judges — particularly Supreme Court justices — must strive to be, and be seen as, above politics. As Kavanaugh said in a 2015 speech, “to be a good judge and a good umpire, it’s important to have the proper demeanor.” He added: “To keep our emotions in check. To be calm amidst the storm. On the bench, to put it in the vernacular, don’t be a jerk.”

Wise words. He wasn’t able to live by them when it mattered. At last week’s hearing, Kavanaugh was a jerk. He spun dark visions of a Democratic conspiracy of vengeance against him. He yelled at Democratic senators, interrupted them frequently, refused to answer questions directly and, at one point, confronted Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who had asked him whether he had ever blacked out from drinking.

“I don’t know,” Kavanaugh sneered. “Have you?” This contempt came only moments after Klobuchar told Kavanaugh about her father’s struggles with alcoholism.

Was Kavanaugh truly out of control, in rage and pain, as he appeared, or had he calculated that a partisan attack would rally Trump and Republican senators to his side, as it did? (We all know he was capable of a more temperate response to the accusations: He had demonstrated that just a couple of nights earlier, in his interview with Fox News). For purposes of Senate confirmation, it shouldn’t matter. Such a lack of self-control, or such open and radical partisanship, ought to be unacceptable in a judge.

And indeed, on Thursday, retired Justice John Paul Stevens, who was appointed by a Republican president, took the astonishing step of saying that Kavanaugh’s performance before the Judiciary Committee should disqualify him from the court. “Senators should really pay attention to it,” he said.

Judges are human beings, not ideological blank slates, but the U.S. legal system depends on their being fair and open-minded to all who come before them. Kavanaugh failed to show that he can do this, or that he even would want to.

That’s a disappointment, but maybe not a surprise to anyone who knew of his life before he joined the bench. He was a fierce Republican warrior in some of the most politically charged battles of the past two decades — including the investigation that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which he sought to expose the most intimate details of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. He also played a role in the most controversial policies of the George W. Bush administration, including the torture of detainees and warrantless wiretapping. (How much of a role we may never learn, since Senate Republicans still refuse to release more than 90 percent of the documents related to Kavanaugh’s work in the Bush administration.)

While many of Kavanaugh’s defenders leapt to exonerate him of sexual assault or excused his rage-bender as understandable, virtually no one has tried to deny his rank partisanship. Yet after last week’s testimony, how could any self-identified Democrat, or leftist, or sexual-assault victim, or anyone who is not identifiable as a Republican, expect to get a fair shake from a Justice Kavanaugh? If he is confirmed, that will pose a profound problem for the court.

It is quite a tribute to Christine Blasey Ford that she has presented the one image of dignity and calm in this howling maelstrom. Blasey testified last week that a drunken Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a 1982 party while they were in high school. Her testimony was credible, and the FBI inquiry was too cursory to substantiate or discredit it.Kavanaugh denies the accusations, and in a court of law — and, we hope, in his life as a U.S. citizen — he is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

He is not, however, entitled to a seat on the Supreme Court. Republican senators have repeatedly said they respected Blasey and were sympathetic to her; but to vote to confirm Kavanaugh now is to declare that her accusations mean nothing.

Presidents have the prerogative to name Supreme Court justices who reflect their values and views of the Constitution. Trump has no shortage of highly qualified, very conservative candidates to choose from, if he will look beyond this first, deeply compromised choice.

Some Republicans have warned that if Kavanaugh’s nomination fails, no decent person will ever want to be put up for the Supreme Court again. This, like so much nonsense in recent weeks, is political hysteria. For starters, consider these seven names: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, John Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch. All were seated on the court since 1991, the last time a Supreme Court nominee faced credible allegations of sexual misconduct. In that case, Clarence Thomas got the job, even in a Democratic-controlled Senate. Since then, not a single nominee has faced allegations of the sort leveled at Kavanaugh.

The only failed nominations since 1991 both came at the hands of Republicans: President George W. Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers, who Republicans said was unqualified; and President Barack Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland, a respected federal judge whose only disqualification was being named by a Democrat. Republicans refused to even grant Garland a hearing. Meanwhile, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices will have been chosen by Republican presidents, and the court has had a Republican-appointed majority for nearly half a century.

The Supreme Court, coequal with Congress and the White House, takes up the most important issues facing the country. Its rulings are often decided by a single vote, and they can affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. Yet the source of the court’s power is not tangible. It holds neither the sword nor the purse, to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton. The court’s legitimacy is founded instead in an act of national faith, of confidence in the integrity and fairness of the justices. It is that confidence that ratifies the court’s decisions as the final word on U.S. law.

That confidence has already been shaken. The court’s party-line vote in Bush v. Gore, which effectively decided the 2000 presidential election, led many Americans to wonder if the justices were nothing but politicians in robes. Sixteen years later, Republicans made the balance of the court more clearly a political prize by blocking Garland.

This confirmation battle has been awful for everyone. It has exposed to the country a depth of partisan grievance and connivance within the Senate that should embarrass and worry every American. It is a terrible reality that, at this point, either confirmation or rejection of Kavanaugh’s nomination by a narrow and overwhelmingly partisan margin will dismay and anger millions of Americans. But only by voting no, by asking Trump to send someone else for it to consider, can the Senate pass its test of institutional character and meet its obligation to safeguard the credibility of the Supreme Court.

One has to wonder whether Russia’s military hackers want to be exposed, given how often they are. Or are these bungled operations just the tip of the iceberg?

On Thursday, the United States, Britain and the Netherlands produced a stunning array of accusations against officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, for cyberattacks involving anti-doping agencies, political campaigns, chemical warfare labs and the downing of a passenger jet.

The coordinated revelations about GRU hacking over the past three years confirmed the many reports that have already emerged about a Russian cyberwarfare program working overtime under fanciful names such as BadRabbit, Fancy Bear or Voodoo Bear to push Russia’s agendas abroad — mostly by trying to control the damage from embarrassing revelations about botched Kremlin operations.

In Washington, the Justice Department announced the indictment of seven GRU officers for a series of cyberattacks, including efforts to hack into anti-doping agencies in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, in an apparent attempt to stymie their investigations into Russia’s systematic doping of its athletes. Three of those named were previously charged by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, with hacking into Democratic Party servers.

Dutch officials, meanwhile, revealed a Russian attempt in April to hack into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Netherlands, which at the time was investigating the nerve agent used in the attempted assassination by the GRU of a GRU double agent in Britain, Sergei Skripal. The Dutch caught and threw out four Russian GRU agents — noting that they were also behind an attack to hack a Swiss lab involved in the inquiry.

Britain, for its part, released a report on GRU cyberattacks that disclosed an attempted hack on the Foreign Office and gave more evidence of GRU involvement in the leak of Democratic emails in 2016.

All that, declared British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, amounted to “reckless and indiscriminate” attacks that left Russia isolated in the international community. But unless there are many more far more successful attacks that the United States and its allies have not disclosed, those revealed Thursday seemed to speak, above all, to the pathetically unsuccessful efforts by Vladimir Putin & Co. to throw their weight around and then try to cover up their failures.

The failed attacks on Skripal, the industrial-scale doping of Russian athletes and the downing of a Malaysian airliner in 2014 were massively damaging to Russia’s standing in the world, and the disclosure that Russian military hackers tried to secretly sneak into agencies investigating them can only make the shame and ridicule greater. As for the 2016 election, the Kremlin must be wondering whether helping to put Donald Trump into the White House was really a triumph, given that it has produced no tangible benefits while generating a huge amount of ill will and a barrage of accusations and investigations.

The Kremlin has responded with its usual ridicule of Western charges, calling them “a diabolical blend of perfume” in a rather sick reference to the perfume bottle used to poison Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent. Putin, a former KGB agent, seems not to have fathomed that few in the West are fooled by his propaganda antics or impressed by his power plays, and that his irresponsible cyberattacks serve only to further diminish his country’s already dismal standing in the world.