That’s the subtitle of my new Confirmation Tales post, which is titled “Reagan’s DOJ Prepares for Another Supreme Court Vacancy.” Steve Matthews, a top aide to Attorney General Ed Meese in the Reagan administration, recounts why he worked to defeat Anthony Kennedy’s candidacy for a Supreme Court seat—and why his efforts failed.
Here is my closing Q&A with Matthews:
Q. Any second thoughts on your opposition to Kennedy?
Twenty years later, a few weeks before I was nominated for the Fourth Circuit vacancy, Jan Crawford’s book Supreme Conflict came out and recounted portions of my memorandum [on Kennedy]. I had described my role and my view in that process to the folks working on the nomination in the White House and in DOJ very early in the process, so it was not news to them. But there was certainly the prospect that it might complicate confirmation, which was already uncertain at best, given the 2006 election results.
In one of my last visits with my father, then recently hospitalized in what was his (fortunately very brief) final illness, I told him about the book. He put everything in perspective with a three-word question and a three-word statement. He asked, “Were you right?”; and when, with knowledge of Justice Kennedy’s first 20 years on the Court, I responded “100 percent!”, he said “Nothing else matters.”