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William Faulkner was not writing about Supreme Court confirmation hearings when he observed that “the past is never dead,” but he might as well have been. Increasingly, the sessions have become open season for relitigating nominations past. Grievances, ancient and recent, are endlessly exhumed and renewed, reduced to their most cartoonish dimensions in pursuit of political advantage.

So go the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week — a cavalcade of complaints about the treatment of conservative nominees past, from Robert H. Bork to Clarence Thomas to Brett M. Kavanaugh. “We started down this road of character assassination in the 1980s with Judge Bork’s hearings, and senators have been engaged in disgusting theatrics ever since,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said in his opening statement Monday.

But the Jackson hearings feature a new leading character: Janice Rogers Brown, a former judge on the federal appeals court in Washington where Jackson now sits.

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Why Brown, whose experience was invoked by four Republican senators during opening statements?

Because like Jackson, she’s a Black woman. Democrats want to see Jackson confirmed, so the Republican argument goes, but they were only too happy to beat up on Brown when she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President George W. Bush in 2003. It took two years and a showdown over the filibuster, but Brown was eventually confirmed, and served for a dozen years.

In the GOP telling, Democrats tried to block Brown from getting the D.C. Circuit credential to forestall her further rise to the Supreme Court. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it, Democrats “happily filibustered” Brown “and they did so precisely because they wanted to prevent Judge Brown from becoming Justice Brown, the first African American woman.”

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Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) raised the issue in his opening statement and returned to the subject during his questioning Tuesday, taking the time to go through Brown’s biography — as if she were the nominee. “She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers,” Graham recited. “She was raised in Alabama under Jim Crow. Despite this adversity, she put herself through law school as a single working mother. … If family mattered, we would not have done to her what was done to her here in the United States Senate.”

What was done to her? Give me a break. Recall, Brown was confirmed. Democrats specifically provided for her confirmation with the Gang of 14 bipartisan agreement not to filibuster judicial nominees except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Sen. Graham, you might want to consider what was done to Merrick Garland, who didn’t get a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination, much less a confirmation vote.

Certainly, Democrats aren’t above playing judicial politics. You’d have to be deliberately naive to believe that the unjustified filibuster of Miguel Estrada’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit from 2001 to 2003 had nothing to do with the prospect of his becoming the first Hispanic justice. (Estrada ended up withdrawing after his nomination languished for 28 months.) No doubt Democrats didn’t want Bush to reap the political benefit of naming a Black woman to the appeals court.

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But the GOP talking points this week on Janice Rogers Brown are glaringly incomplete, omitting that Brown, as a California Supreme Court justice, had a record of extremism that fully justified Democrats’ opposition. She advocated a return to the discredited Lochner era, when an overreaching U.S. Supreme Court claimed the Constitution restricts federal and state government power to enact economic regulation; she described 1937, when the court backed off its legal assault on the New Deal, as “the triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

In October 2003, The Post’s editorial page, which supported Estrada’s confirmation, called Brown “one of the most unapologetically ideological nominees of either party in many years.” A June 2005 editorial headlined “Reject Justice Brown” described her as a judge “who has been more open about her enthusiasm for judicial adventurism than any nominee of either party in a long time,” adding, “No senator who votes for her will have standing any longer to complain about legislating from the bench.”

Conservative Post columnist George F. Will described Brown as “out of that mainstream” of “conservative jurisprudence,” adding, “That should not be an automatic disqualification, but it is a fact.”

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When you don’t have the facts, argue the law. When you don’t have the law, argue the facts. When you don’t have either, whine about history.

The judicial wars are never-ending. Each side will nurse and rehearse its perceived injuries and the other side’s perceived abuses. But it needs to be said: Democrats’ different treatment of Janice Rogers Brown and Ketanji Brown Jackson isn’t evidence of Democrats’ situational commitment to diversity. It’s evidence that — guess what — all Black female judges aren’t the same.

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