The Senate should not confirm Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. His confirmation would do serious damage to the credibility and integrity of the Supreme Court as a critically important institution in our constitutional system.

I say this not because Kavanaugh is not intellectually qualified to serve on the court. To the contrary, viewed solely from that perspective, he is as well qualified as most of the other justices who have been confirmed in recent decades — including Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, David Souter, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, to name just a few. From this standpoint, I agree with the American Bar Association’s original evaluation that Kavanaugh is intellectually and professionally well qualified to serve on the court.

For a number of reasons, though, other considerations enter the picture. First, there is the unconscionable conduct of Senate Republicans in refusing to confirm President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland in 2016. By any measure, Garland was as qualified as — indeed, more qualified than — Kavanaugh. But the Senate Republicans, in order to manipulate the confirmation process in a determined effort to control the future direction of the court, violated every well-established norm in a profoundly dishonest effort to get our nation to this point — a point at which, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, there will be five Justices on the Supreme Court who are more aggressively conservative than any other justice, except Antonin Scalia, who has served on the court in living memory.

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