The Shame of Brett Kavanaugh

I moved to Austin to work on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in April 1999. Looking back on that time, it seems like a dream from an era far more distant than 26 years.

The first trip I took with then-Governor Bush was to the Mexico side of the Texas-Mexico border to film him with the President of Mexico opening a bridge between Mexico and Texas. Yeah, a bridge. What is most remarkable about that moment was that it was totally unremarkable. The idea that a Texas governor would promote stronger ties to Mexico and facilitate cross-border commerce and engagement was like a ribbon-cutting at a new industry. Mexico was overwhelmingly the largest trading partner with Texas, accounting for over 45% of all state exports.

A year before the bridge opening, Bush had rejected calls for a border wall between Mexico and Texas. “For those who want to wall off Mexico from Texas, I say you're dead wrong,” Bush told the Washington Post. "For people who want to isolate Mexico from Texas through a psychological war of words, there could be nothing worse. We share problems, we share a long border. But the best way to solve our common problems is to do so in the spirit of friendship and to treat each other decently."

Bush was elected Texas governor in 1994, the same year that California Governor Pete Wilson was running a vicious anti-immigration re-election campaign that was a precursor to Trump’s 2016 “Mexicans are rapists.” The centerpiece of Wilson’s campaign was Proposition 187, a ballot initiative marketed under “SOS – Save Our State” with the goal of denying state services to anyone who was not legally documented...