Kavanaugh has proven he's no pure originalist; consider what it means that the Left savaged him anyway

Face it. You knew that what Josh Hammer is saying in his latest piece for the Daily Wire was true a year ago. You had your hopes up that the Very Stable Genius's second Supreme Court pick would be Amy Coney Barrett, Mike Lee or some similarly credentialed originalist.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as Hammer did in a February column in which he called Kavanaugh a "DC swamp creature," but consider the track record he lays out in this latest piece:

At various times since ascending to the highest court, Kavanaugh has now been positively wobbly on issues ranging from Planned Parenthood funding to capital punishment to criminal defendants' rights to products liability to antitrust liability. While we have a small total sample size, we now have a sufficient breadth of indicia so as to, at minimum, sound an early alarm. As a rule of thumb, if a Republican judicial nominee votes this often against conservatives' jurisprudential lodestar, Justice Clarence Thomas, then there is likely something seriously wrong.

But as I argued on Monday, Kavanaugh's squishiness was so eminently foreseeable. The great irony to the Left's vile, personally vindictive, morally destructive, all-hands-on-deck, scorched-earth campaign to destroy Kavanaugh the man was always that Kavanaugh the jurist has always been a jurisprudentially moderate Republican judge. A longtime GOP establishment golden boy with lifelong inside-the-Beltway credentials and Bush White House alumnus status, Kavanaugh has always been best described as "Karl Rove in a robe." It was certainly no aberration that Kavanaugh was the federal appellate judge who took it upon himself to craft the legal roadmap to uphold the Obamacare "tax" mandate.

In short, it is misguided to ascribe Kavanaugh's slow start to some desire, post-character assassination campaign, to grovel before and make amends with the Left. Kavanaugh is not betraying his true self in a ham-handed effort to curry favor with what Andrew Breitbart famously dubbed the Democrat-media complex. Instead, the reality is that this is simply who Brett Kavanaugh is. It brings me nothing but agony, but the reality is that those on the Left who fear that this presently constituted Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade — I'm looking at you, Jeffrey Toobin — ought to not fear. Brett Kavanaugh, like fellow squish and Obamacare apologist Chief Justice John Roberts, is maybe a "safe seventh vote" to overturn Roe. 

Hammer goes on to list and elaborate upon three lessons conservatives ought to draw from this, and I recommend your contemplation of them.

But the point I'd make here is a bit more basic: The savagery and lies that were heaped upon Kavanaugh during his confirmation process demonstrate just how much leftists hate anything or anyone even one micro-inch to the right of the ideological center line. There were two types of leftists inflicting the savagery: Those who knew that Kavanaugh was not the rock-ribbed originalist that conservatives had hoped to get nominated but saw that he had to be eviscerated anyway, and those (and this is a far greater number) who are not nearly so well-informed but are just instinctively reviled at any judicial nominee not put forth by one of their own. In short, if a Republican nominated the judge, he or she must be icky and probably wants to make The Handmaid's Tale a reality.

So the path forward ought to be clear. Go ahead and nominate the judges much closer to our ideal. The brutality inflicted by the Left can't be any worse than it was for an iffy nominee like Kavanaugh.

Which, by the way - ahem, are you listening, Republicans? - is why the Right ought to nominate actual conservatives for offices from president on down to city council member. They are easier to defend than people without much of a discernible rudder.