Dissent

April 26, 2021
Los Angeles Times editor Calmes debuts with a scrupulous history of the Republican Party’s efforts to put a conservative “lock” on the Supreme Court. Calmes tracks how the party’s rightward shift over the past 40 years—from the Reagan revolution to the Tea Party and Trumpism—played out in an increasingly aggressive approach toward stacking the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Calmes sketches the hearings of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and others, but spends the most time on Brett Kavanaugh’s rise through the ranks of Republican legal circles. She delves into the creation and growing influence of the Federalist Society, which Kavanaugh joined in 1988, and details his work assisting independent counsel Kenneth Starr in his investigation of the Clintons, as well as serving as White House staff secretary to George W. Bush. Calmes also offers insight into Stanford University research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford’s decision to come forward with sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, and makes a convincing argument that Kavanaugh misled Congress about his knowledge of the Bush administration’s “illegal surveillance and torture policies” and a Republican aide’s theft of thousands of emails and memos sent by Democratic senators and their aides in the early 2000s. Though Calmes covers familiar ground, she lucidly and comprehensively explains the mechanics of the “ascendant conservative legal movement.” Liberals will be outraged by this richly detailed rundown of Republican provocations.

April 9, 2021

Investigative journalist Calmes uses archival materials and firsthand interviews to methodically present the controversy surrounding the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Calmes sets this story amid the Republican Party's rightward movement and conservative populism, under the influences of Reagan, Gingrich, the Tea Party, and Trump. She diagnoses increasing political polarization on all sides and the dominance of politicians who are more interested in campaigning than governing. The book offers an evaluative exposition of Kavanaugh's social and academic activities at Georgetown Prep and Yale (and his initial involvement with the Federalist Society); Robert Bork's and Clarence Thomas's similarly contested Supreme Court nominations; and the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that were raised by Debbie Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, and Christine Blasey Ford. For other delineations and interpretations of these events by journalists, readers might consider Justice on Trial, by Mollie Hemingway, or Search and Destroy, by Ryan Lovelace, both published in 2019, as well as Ronan Farrow's articles in the New Yorker. VERDICT This exhaustively detailed book will engage general readers interested in civic duty and privacy. Contemporary journalistic treatments of the confirmation will have to suffice until historical perspective produces what scholars may consider a definitive account.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2021
An investigation of the stumbling path by which Brett Kavanaugh was installed on the Supreme Court. The conservative movement has been playing a very long game when it comes to the judiciary, writes Calmes, who spent four decades reporting on the White House and Congress for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Since the Reagan era, the GOP has taken every opportunity to pack the courts with judges who are reliably anti-abortion, anti-regulation, and pro-gun. Since the 1990s, writes the author, the Republican Party has "moved so far to the right that it was on the wrong side of history on many issues"--and yet it has stubbornly stuck to that wrongness. George Bush's putatively compassionate conservatism became a quest for privatizing Social Security while Donald Trump's ideology seemed driven by a desire to be America's first king. As Calmes reminds us, Trump was able to place three justices on the Supreme Court bench, "the first justices in history to be first, chosen by a president who'd failed to win the popular vote and, second, confirmed by a majority of senators with fewer votes--many millions fewer--than the senators who voted 'no.' " In the case of Kavanaugh, that vote count amounted to nearly 25 million. That hardly mattered to GOP leadership, who only cared that he was a conservative Christian who, in his work as a federal judge, "predictably favored corporations, police, and executive power"--as long as the executive power was wielded by a Republican. In Trump's eyes, of course, this made Kavanaugh the perfect man for the job even though, Calmes notes, advisers (including daughter Ivanka) urged him to find someone of higher moral character. Trump didn't, and five Republican senators lost their seats because of their support for Kavanaugh. A well-written, deeply informed account of the long battle to steer the Supreme Court rightward.

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