THE PARTIES to a civil war almost never agree on why it began-and the parties to America's decades-old fight for control of the Supreme Court are no different. For Republicans, the cause of the conflict is a Democratic Party that has tried to block conservative justices, starting with Robert Bork's failed nomination in 1987, by underhand means. In attacking Bork's opposition to civil-rights legislation, Ted Kennedy abandoned a bipartisan tradition of assessing judicial nominees on their qualifications, not their values; in airing allegations of sexual abuse against Clarence Thomas in 1991, Democrats allegedly took that a step further; ditto in the sorry case of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
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