Brett Kavanaugh once insisted that a judge's "demeanor" was crucial, but MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski agreed he had violated his own standard of behavior.
The "Morning Joe" co-hosts played a clip of the Supreme Court nominee saying, in 2015, that judges must remain calm and stay above the partisan fray, but they agreed his statements last week under oath almost certainly upset the chief justice.
"My gut instinct, John Roberts has to be as concerned as anybody about Judge Kavanaugh getting on the Supreme Court," Scarborough said. "Here is a guy who voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act because he said, 'No, the Supreme Court won't get in the middle of your political dispute, we're not going to reverse what happened at the ballot box.' For him it was about holding the integrity of the institution."
Scarborough admitted he didn't know how Roberts felt about Kavanaugh, but he and Brzezinski agreed the chief justice had to be "horrified" by the nominee's interview with Fox News and his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal cleaning up his emotional testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"The display alone has got to bring pause to every member of the Supreme Court," Brzezinski said. "This is the highest court in the land and you hear Judge Kavanaugh himself with that tape from 2015 talking about the temperament, what it takes, what's called for to be a federal judge, and he blew through every stop sign he laid out. I think it can be argued he failed."
Scarborough said the nominee had failed the most basic test he set for himself.
"In 2015 he talked about what a federal judge must be," Scarborough said. "Must be nonpartisan, must be sure they don't act like jerks, must be sure they stay calm and stay measured. Again, his supporters could always say, 'Well, he was under a lot of pressure, he had been attacked unfairly.'"
"I think history has shown us the great leaders," he continued, "the great jurists, the great public figures are the one who in the darkest moments keep their head and are Churchillian about these challenges like Churchill was in 1940. Brett Kavanaugh did the exact opposite under extreme pressure of what he told law students just three years before that they should do."
