The fear-mongering and demonization started even before President Trump named anyone to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, as evidence by the fill-in-the-blank, boiler-plate statement from the Women’s March embedded below.

Trump seemingly went for the seemingly more confirmable “mainstream” candidate by nominating Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit. Kavanaugh obviously possesses the legal credentials, and even has the support of Never Trump Sen. John McCain. His establishment and Bush ties make some conservatives uneasy, but time will tell.

Kavanaugh has authored 300 opinions as an appeals court judge, which is a good and bad thing, depending upon your perspective. Obviously the left will be cherry-picking his entire paper trail to find any statements that they can use to level false accusations of racism, sexism, and/or homophobia. If you’ve followed judicial nominations before, you’ve already seen this movie and its many sequels. Note that obstructionist Democrats stalled his nomination to the D.C. Circuit for three years before he was finally confirmed in May 2006.

Parenthetically, you may recall that Democrats used similar filibuster tactics to prevent the confirmation of Clinton/Bush lawyer Miguel Estrada to the D. C. Circuit in 2003.

Amy Barrett (who is probably next up should another vacancy on the high court occur) was probably seen as too controversial, plus she has only served as a judge for less than one year. At crunch time, the other two judges on the short list perhaps were probably never really in contention. Hopefully Trump will go outside the Ivy League in naming future nominees.

In a New York Times editorial,  Akhil Reed Amal, a self-described liberal and Hillary Clinton voter who teaches at Yale Law School, described former student Bret Kavanaugh as a superb nominee.

“The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice is President Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move. Last week the president promised to select ‘someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.’ In picking Judge Kavanaugh, he has done just that.”

Optics: Someone should have reminded Kavanaugh — which was set for the much taller Trump — to lower the microphone just a bit when he went to the podium last night in the White House East Room after the president spoke