Did Democrats Overreach on Their Strategy to Block Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee?
While all eyes are on Ohio’s 12th congressional race and its special election, there is another battle brewing: the fight to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Senate Democrats have vowed to fight this nomination with every fiber of their being, though the ground game to do so has been remarkably lackluster—and progressives have noticed. We’ll get to that in a second, but for now—Democrats want all the documents relating to Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House.
Judge Kavanaugh is from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. President Trump selected him upon news of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, which occurred at the end of July. The Bush documents are part of a delay strategy from Democrats. There are millions of pages to sift through, and not nearly enough staffers at the National Archives to turn over those pages within the timeframe Republicans want to confirm Kavanaugh. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has requested some of the Bush documents, but not all of them (via WaPo):
Senators escalated a bitter dispute over Brett M. Kavanaugh’s documents — signaling a contentious confirmation fight ahead for the Supreme Court nominee even as senators on Tuesday successfully installed another appellate judge under President Trump.
Infuriated with Republicans for requesting only a portion of Kavanaugh’s records from his tenure in the George W. Bush White House, Democratic senators sent a wide-ranging request to the National Archives demanding that his entire paper trail be provided to Congress.
The letter, sent Tuesday, asks for all of Kavanaugh’s records from his time as an associate White House counsel under Bush, as well as his years as staff secretary. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to replace retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, served for two years in the counsel’s office and three years as staff secretary — a high-ranking position that controls the flow of documents in and out of the Oval Office.
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