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Outside the court, however, things will be more difficult. If Democrats win the House – and the polls give them about 75% chance – Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat chaired for the Judiciary Committee, promised an investigation. Kavanaugh would face a much harder cooking than the Republican-controlled check confirmation hearing. There could also be a long list of hostile witnesses. Cue the circus of the media. There is a good chance that the House will be charged, even though it is unlikely that two-thirds of the Senate will vote in favor of the conviction.
Kavanaugh may also have difficulty moving around the wider world. He says himself that he may not be able to train women's basketball anymore and that it is hard to imagine him going to law schools without facing massive protests. He may find it hard to keep his position in Washington society if angry public members criticized him wherever he went.
It is predicted that Kavanaugh will become the next Thomas, nicknamed "the most ferocious justice". Thomas defended a position on the far right of the Court and remained fiercely loyal to the conservative groups that supported him. He seems to be clearly angering his opponents in the time of confirmation. In his memoir, he compared the "left wing fanatics" that he encountered in Washington in an unfavorable manner with the Ku Klux Klan.
If Kavanaugh follows a similar path, he will become an embittered supporter, joining the right wing of the Court, defiantly rejecting petitions for recusation, clashing with the warm conservative federalist society – and writing a vitriolic memoir. This could in no way be an attractive prospect for him personally, and the fact that two of the nine members of the Court are injured, ideologues settling his grievances would seriously undermine the reputation of the Court.
However, there is another option. Kavanaugh can not undo the past, but he can recognize the damage caused by his presence at a vital institution. And he can devote himself to minimizing it. His guide should not be Thomas, but his vow of pre-confirmation in his the Wall Street newspaper op-ed to be "balanced, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good".
It could start with challenges. This undermines confidence in the Court when judges rule in cases where there is an appearance of bias, and this will be particularly true for Justice Kavanaugh, who not only delivered a partisan tirade in the Senate, but also declared worrying that. He could get his fellow judges to recuse themselves more often and explain why they do it.
Kavanaugh could also persuade his colleagues not to attend partisan rallies, such as the one Judge Neil Gorsuch attended last year at the Trump International Hotel, funded by the libertarian Charles Koch Foundation. And he could persuade them to stop accepting emoluments from people interested in the way the Court rules. (Scalia died while she was in a luxury ranch in Texas, in a room that he was not paying for.) Partisan rallies suggest that judges represent spectrum ideological camps. The emoluments look corrupt. There is no code of ethics applicable to the Court, but Kavanaugh could strive to persuade his colleagues to improve their ethics on their own.
Kavanaugh could also defend television cameras in court, which his colleagues have long resisted. Rather than harboring resentment over how he appeared on television, he could argue that the American public has the right, indeed the duty, to oversee the operation of the country's highest court. And he could invite the public to watch it, as he promised in his editorial, better than in his testimony in the Senate.
The best way for Kavanaugh to prove that he is "impartial, open-minded, independent," and not just an ideological agent, would be to work with Chief Justice John Roberts and Judges Kagan and Stephen Breyer to create a , unpredictable center of the Court. The public expects 5 to 4 radical conservative decisions in the most important cases.
Justice Kavanaugh: Please surprise us.
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