Supreme partisanship

Ms Marcus's book is impressively reported, highly insightful and a rollicking good read. It also adds another dispiriting data point that the American Republic is seriously ailing

Supreme Ambition Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover | Ruth Marcus | Simon & Schuster; $28; 482 pages

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Brett Kavanaugh had a confirmation hearing like none other, because of the extraordinary testimony of one woman. Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party decades earlier. “Brett got on top of me,” she said, and “began running his hands over my body and grinding his hips into me.” He groped her, she said, and tried to take her clothes off. When she yelled, she said, he put