Senate Democrats, led by leftist Senator Chuck Schumer (shown) of New York, say the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is on hold until they have examined every jot and tittle of every document he ever touched.
And not just as a judge. They want records of what he did when he worked in the Bush White House.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fired back last week, as The New American reported, saying that the Democrats won’t get away with it. McConnell said he’ll make sure he drags out the vote on Kavanaugh as long as possible to keep Democrats in Washington, D.C., during campaign season.
And one of McConnell’s lieutenants, Judiciary chief Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), says he won’t permit Schumer’s radical gang to go fishing on the taxpayers’ dime.
Millions of Documents Sought
According to the Associated Press, the Democrats are girding for a war over documents — lots of them.
Said Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), “We’ve already begun to hear rumblings from our Democratic colleagues that they’re going to want to see every scrap of paper that ever came across Brett Kavanaugh’s desk.”
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Senator Dianne Feinstein — just defeated in her bid to get the endorsement of California’s Democratic Party — said getting the documents is imperative: “It is, ultimately, the Supreme Court that will have the last word on whether a sitting president is above the law,” she told AP. “We — the Senate — and the American public must know where Judge Kavanaugh stands…. And this starts with having access to Judge Kavanaugh’s documents from his time in the White House and as a political operative.”
What does all this mean? That Schumer, Feinstein, and the Democrats will eventually seek millions of documents. Who will read them all, we are not given to know. But seek them they will, AP reported:
At particular issue in the document fight are the years the Yale-educated Kavanaugh spent at the White House as staff secretary for Bush — a job that touches almost every slip of paper that makes it to the president’s desk — as well as his work during the Clinton probe and the Florida election recount.
Kavanaugh served in the White House Counsel’s Office under Bush beginning in 2001. He told lawmakers in a May 2006 confirmation hearing for his current job that he provided advice on ethics and separation of power issues, the nomination of judges, and legislation dealing with tort reform and a federal backstop to limit insurers’ losses in the event of a terror attack.
But the Democrats aren’t going on that excursion without a fight.
Said Iowa’s Grassley, “I will not allow taxpayers to be on the hook for a government-funded fishing expedition.”
Grassley noted that the confirmation of Associate Justice Elena Kagan surfaced only 173,00 documents, while that of Neil Gorsuch unearthed 182,000.
Warning to Democrats
Democrats will try to stop Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Court, fearing that he might be a vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion in all 50 states in 1973.
The Left collapsed into a conniption when Trump announced his pick, a veteran with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Such was their consternation — and readiness to oppose any nominee — that one extremist group didn’t correct the statement it had prepared in the expectation that Trump would nominate a woman. One statement referred to Kavanaugh as “she” and used “XXX” where his name was supposed to appear. It discussed “white patriarchal oppression.”
For their part, Senate Democrats don’t appear to need the documents, which will merely provide a fig leaf to cover their decision to vote against him before nightfall the day Trump picked him. “The Senate should reject this divisive nominee,” huffed Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts.
“I’ll be voting no,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).
However any Democrat plans to vote — and how most will vote is hardly a secret — McConnell says he won’t allow Schumer to turn the confirmation into a circus.
As Politico noted, McConnell’s postponing the vote could harm Democrats back home. It would keep “vulnerable red-state Democrats off the campaign trail while potentially forcing anti-Kavanaugh liberals to swallow a demoralizing defeat just ahead of the midterms,” and “McConnell believes the Democratic base will be ‘deflated’ if [Democratic senators] raise hopes of defeating Kavanaugh only to lose just days before the election.”
Photo: AP Images
