For the last 30 years, Republican nominations for the Supreme Court have faced personal, ugly, defamatory attacks from Democrats. //

Every time a Republican president has nominated someone to the Supreme Court in the last 30 years, with one notable exception, Democrats have responded by smearing the nominee with accusations of ideological extremism, racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, plagiarism, and, most infamously in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s case, gang rape. //

But the Kavanaugh hearings were not a break with the Democrats’ norms, they were merely an extreme manifestation of a 30-year tradition that began with Robert Bork, President Reagan’s nominee in 1987, whose confirmation hearing was the most divisive and partisan in Supreme Court history up to that point.