Editorials of The Times

So what now?

The degrading spectacle of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process is behind us; the degrading era of his service on the Supreme Court lies ahead. If senators vote as expected Saturday, Kavanaugh, with a razor-thin victory on an almost strict party-line Senate vote, will be sworn in as the newest associate justice of the Supreme Court as early as next week.

Credible accusations of sexual assault, lies told under oath, explicitly partisan attacks on the senators trying to assess his fitness to serve: None of it was enough to give Republican leaders more than momentary pause in their campaign to seize decisive control of the Supreme Court.

Depending on your politics, you might pick one starting point or another for the nastiness of the modern battles between the parties over individual court seats. But it was Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who openly established partisan control of the court itself as the stakes in the struggle. He refused to allow Barack Obama to fill a vacancy for almost a year, holding the seat open to draw evangelical voters to the polls and elect a Republican president.

That was a clever gambit, though it had the downside of risking the credibility of the American legal system. The bet has now paid off, and the risk has been realized.

The president whom McConnell helped elect turned out to be Donald Trump. And while Trump had plenty of qualified, highly conservative lawyers to pick among, he chose to insist on Kavanaugh. The result was a confirmation process, and now almost certainly a justice, tainted by dishonesty, shamelessness, self-pity, indifference to women’s fears and calculated divisiveness — the hallmarks, in other words, of Trump’s politics.

Having first sickened the White House and then Congress, the virus of Trumpism is about to spread to the Supreme Court itself.

The court has had a majority of Republican-appointed justices for nearly half a century, of course, and its credibility has endured, despite controversial decisions like Bush v. Gore, which handed the White House to a Republican president. But the elevation of Kavanaugh represents something new.

The nation is now facing the possibility of three or four decades with a justice credibly accused of sexual assault, one who may well be the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, or at least make it so hard for a woman to exercise her constitutional right to make her own medical decisions that the ruling is effectively nullified. Thirty to 40 years with a justice whose honesty was tested and found wanting. A justice so injudicious in his manner that thousands of law professors, and a retired Supreme Court justice, opposed his confirmation. A judge is supposed to set personal feelings aside and approach even the most sensitive and emotional matters with a cool disposition and an open mind; Kavanaugh revealed to the country that he was incapable of that.

In saner times, such behavior from a nominee would have sent reasonable Republicans running for the exits. But in the end, only Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had the courage of her convictions. She can go home knowing that she did the right thing.

The task of plugging the holes and patching the rents in the court’s legitimacy now falls to the justices themselves, mainly to Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. He must know that every decision of political significance rendered by a 5-4 majority that includes a Justice Kavanaugh will, at the very least, appear to be the product of bias and vengeance. If he cares about the integrity of the court as much as he claims to, the chief will do everything in his power to steer the court away from cases, and rulings, that could deepen the nation’s political divide.

There’s work the rest of us can do as well.

We can, for one thing, find ways in our own workplaces and communities to assure victims of sexual assault that they will be respected if they come forward, even if so many national political figures are dismissive of them.

And if we disapprove of the direction of the courts, we can put the lessons Mitch McConnell taught us to work — and vote.

It’s worth noting that, of the five justices picked by Republicans, including Kavanaugh, four were nominated by presidents who first took office after losing the popular vote. And the slim majority of senators who said they would vote to confirm Kavanaugh on Saturday represents tens of millions fewer Americans than the minority of senators who voted to reject him. The nation’s founders were wise to design the court as a counter-majoritarian institution, but they couldn’t have been picturing this.

Most Americans are not where this Senate majority is. They do not support Trump. They do not approve of relentless partisanship and disregard for the integrity of democratic institutions. And they have the power to call their government to account.

In his first column for The Washington Post a year ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi explained why he and others who had dared criticize the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had been forced to go into self-imposed exile: “We are not opposed to our government and care deeply about Saudi Arabia. It is the only home we know or want. Yet we are the enemy.”

On Friday, the space where Khashoggi’s column should have appeared in The Post was blank, with only his photograph, the headline “A missing voice” and his byline over an empty space. Khashoggi, 59, has gone silent after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday to get divorce documents he needed to remarry.

He had feared going there. Before entering, he gave his mobile phone to his Turkish fiancée and told her to seek help if he did not reappear. The Saudis insist he got his documents and left, going as far as to offer that the consulate could be searched; Turkish officials say they never saw him leave. The chilling possibility is that both are right, that Khashoggi was spirited out in a diplomatic vehicle and taken away to join the many other critics of Salman who have been rounded up without due process.

Since he was named heir to his ailing father last year and the true power behind the throne, MBS, as the prince is widely known, dispensed change and fear in unequal doses. Though lauded for social and economic reforms such as letting women drive, restraining profligate princes and reining in the religious police, he has also cracked down furiously on any dissent, detaining many critics and sending others, like Khashoggi, into exile. The intolerance for criticism has not been limited to his subjects: When Canada urged Saudi authorities to release the just-arrested sister of an imprisoned blogger this summer, Salman’s response was to recall his ambassador, freeze trade relations, pull Saudi students out of Canada and cancel flights between Saudi Arabia and Toronto.

That was the sort of behavior Khashoggi criticized in his columns and public speeches. He knew his country and how it worked; he had been fired from a job as editor-in-chief of a major newspaper, and he had served as an adviser to Saudi ambassadors in London and Washington. And yet it was under Salman that he felt most threatened, and most distraught. “I have made a different choice now,” he wrote. “I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison.”

That is the same reason that all who can should raise their voices in support of Khashoggi — and all the other brave voices that have been forcibly silenced. Raise them so that even a tyrannical reformer will hear.