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Chief Justice Roberts’ Troubling Comment Is Worse Than You Think

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Chief Justice John Roberts erroneously believes that his court is supreme to the other independent branches of government, yet he evidently doesn’t believe the Supreme Court is supreme to the lower courts of his own branch of government.

As a drive-by Thanksgiving curse to the nation last week, John Roberts took the extraordinary step of answering a question directly posed to his office by the AP regarding Trump’s frustration with lower court judges violating national sovereignty by issuing lawless injunctions. After Judge Jon Tigar took the unprecedented step of placing an injunction on our border admission policies and violated all legal norms and rules of standing, Trump said, “This was an Obama judge, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen like this anymore.”

When presented with the question by AP, rather than following tradition and simply saying “no comment,” Roberts responded, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” He concluded, “The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Despite the dead news cycle of Thanksgiving eve, this comment set off a firestorm of headlines blaring the news that the “Chief Justice hits Trump in rare rebuke.” Undoubtedly, Roberts knew exactly how the media would convey his remark.

This comment is even more troubling than many realize, and it has nothing to do with Trump. It has everything to do with dangerous judicial supremacy of the robed priesthood and a reluctance to actually reform that priesthood from his perch as high priest.

As I’ve observed in painstaking detail over the past few years, despite the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, the lower courts are more liberal than ever and are violating the most basic legal doctrines of standing and the plenary power doctrine on immigration. Yet the Supreme Court has continuously been slow to take up the appeals from these unprecedented injunctions and often refuses to take up the appeals at all, even though these rulings violate settled law on immigration. Even when it does, the decisions fail to categorically rebuke these lower court judges, as Clarence Thomas has done in his own writings.

As such, I have concluded that despite the optimism on the Right of a more conservative Supreme Court, there won’t be enough Clarence Thomases to shut down the endless lawless lawfare in the lower courts. Worse, because the political class has already put the Supreme Court on notice for being “political,” Roberts is even more reluctant to aggressively take emergency appeals and categorically rebuke those judges. As Vanderbilt Law School Professor Brian Fitzpatrick predicted on my podcast several months ago, Roberts and several other justices will be “conservative” in the sense that they will be cautious to aggressively swat down these lower court opinions.

And let’s not forget that while the other branches continue to regard lower courts as supreme and John Roberts fails to act, there is irreversible damage from these injunctions on our national security policy. “It’s very concerning,” Professor Fitzpatrick told me, “because the Supreme Court is conservative institutionally … they do not like to get involved in matters until the issue has received percolation. They like legal issues to have been bounced around in the lower courts for years before they drop in and settle the issue.”

Thus, Roberts and his colleagues are allowing every radical lower court trend to gain traction. There is nothing out of bounds in his mind — except for Trump’s frustration with this process.

If lower courts are violating the law on the one hand and if members of the other branches of government are saying things that politically offend the Chief Justice on the other hand, which one should he be quicker to rebuke? Roberts has been completely silent about lawless lower court judges, but suddenly, he’s quick on the draw when it comes to rebuking the president — the executive branch — for simply making a political statement about the bad opinions, which is what one would expect from a president of either party. Is Roberts now suggesting that the judiciary is above reproach?

“The independent judiciary” is a mindless bromide being used to silence debate, and just like the canard of “separation of church and state,” it is not in the Constitution. The Constitution says the exact opposite. No branch of government can make itself supreme or independent from the reach of the other branches’ powers. In fact, the entire judiciary and its structure was created by Congress. Congress has full authority to strip Roberts’ court of all appellate jurisdiction and abolish the lower courts altogether. As Roberts’ colleague, Clarence Thomas, recently wrote, “When Congress strips federal courts of jurisdiction, it exercises a valid legislative power no less than when it lays taxes, coins money, declares war, or invokes any other power that the Constitution grants it.”

Accordingly, if Congress were to exercise this power, would Roberts bemoan the assault on the “independent judiciary”?

Turns out the Constitution itself didn’t respect an independent judiciary, because it gave Congress the power to regulate its jurisdiction. As Edmund Randolph, the first attorney general of the United States, said in 1790, “The Supreme Court, though inherent in the Constitution, was to receive the first motion from Congress; the inferior courts must have slept forever without the pleasure of Congress.”

Roberts believes in judicial supremacism. But that belief makes his utter callous disregard of lower court tyranny all the more indefensible. Roberts has already allowed an egregious global warming lawsuit to proceed; he has allowed courts to mandate that Trump continue Obama’s discretionary policies; and he has enabled the Ninth Circuit to force Arizona to follow Obama’s amnesty rather than our sovereignty laws on the books.

The real question is how many of the other justices will follow the lead of Roberts and go out of their way to show that they are not deferential to Trump, even when the law requires that result? Justices Alito and Kavanaugh did not join Thomas and Gorsuch in trying to stop the insane global warming lawsuit.

The more Roberts continues this duplicity of wielding judicial supremacism over the president but taking a hands-off approach to his lawless minions in the lower courts, he will learn the lesson of Scalia’s prophecy in his blockbuster Obergefell dissent: “With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.” (For more from the author of “Chief Justice Roberts’ Troubling Comment Is Worse Than You Think” please click HERE)

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Supreme Court to Hear Another Landmark Religious Liberty Case

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The Supreme Court granted cert last week in what promises to be another landmark case on religious liberty — call it the Masterpiece Cakeshop case of war memorials. In The American Legion et al. v. American Humanist Association et al, the Supreme Court will decide whether to reverse a lower court decision that ruled the Bladensburg World War I Veterans Memorial should be removed. The plaintiffs argue a public monument that includes any aspect of Christianity entangles government and religion and is therefore unconstitutional.

The Bladensburg World War I Veterans Memorial is a 93-year-old cross-shaped monument that sits in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on state land. Decades ago, local Gold Star mothers spearheaded the project to honor 49 Prince George’s County men who gave their lives while serving in WWI.

They chose a cross shape to mimic the cross-shaped grave markers standing over the countless American graves on the Western Front of that war. This gesture was particularly meaningful for family members who were unable to bury their dead on U.S. soil. The monument stood for dozens of years, until 2014, when the American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit claiming the cross-shaped memorial was unconstitutional.

In 2015, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland disagreed, ruling the memorial was in fact constitutional. Crosses mark the graves of fallen American servicemen overseas, in Arlington cemetery, and in hundreds of other important places we remember the fallen . . .

The Supreme Court will now hear the merits of the case and decide if the latest ruling that found the monument unconstitutional should stand or not. As was to be expected, liberals are not happy the Supreme Court decided to hear this case. For starters, it’s typically a good sign when the court wants to hear something. It means they might disagree with the previous ruling. The Supreme Court has reversed 70 percent of lower court rulings since 2007, so the chances the previous decision will be overturned are high. (Read more from “Supreme Court to Hear Another Landmark Religious Liberty Case” HERE)

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Second Kavanaugh Accuser Steps Forward With Her Story

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Brett Kavanaugh’s former classmate at Yale, Deborah Ramirez, stepped forward on Sunday night accusing the Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault.

Ramirez detailed her account of the alleged assault in an exclusive with The New Yorker after spending a week conferring with her attorney and attempting to piece together gaps of the story she can’t remember.

According to Ramirez, she and Kavanaugh were both freshmen at Yale when they both attended a party at Lawrance Hall on-campus. The group of college students sat together in a circle and played a drinking game. Ramirez said she was repeatedly pick to drink and quickly became incoherent. She said one of the young men “pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction.” . . .

From The New Yorker:

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”

(Read more from “Second Kavanaugh Accuser Steps Forward With Her Story” HERE)

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Our Founders Never Thought the Courts Had the Final Say — and Neither Should We

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“Whenever a free people should give up in absolute submission to any department of government, retaining for themselves no appeal from it, their liberties were gone.” ~Abraham Lincoln, citing Thomas Jefferson

As a conservative who believes both in conservative policy outcomes and the authentic interpretation of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment, I wish we had nine Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court and like-minded judges on the lower courts. I wish every policy emanating from Congress or state legislatures that I felt violated my interpretation of the Constitution would immediately be placed in front of this eminent tribunal with life tenure so that it could be vetoed. Yet I recognize that this is a system more tyrannical than the one we fought in 1776. However, it is indeed the system we now face, except that the overwhelming majority of judges – both Republican and Democrat – do not interpret the Constitution but make it up as they go.

A republic or a dictatorship of the robes?

It is clear that Democrats believe the courts are the final say on every constitutional question – no matter how absurd their ruling is. They further believe that once a court uses this phantom “veto” power a single time on the progressive side of the question, even when that ruling is overturning 200 years of laws, political practices, customs, and prior court precedent, it is unassailable, not just by the other branches of government but even by a subsequent court.

Republicans disagree with the latter point, as they feel another court can overturn a previous court, but they fundamentally accept the premise that a court opinion in an individual case can set broad precedent that is self-executing and universally binding as the law on everyone and out of reach of the other two branches. As both Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Judge Kavanaugh indicated during questioning last week, the only recourse for Congress is to attempt to pass a constitutional amendment.

This is simply not true and is a threat to the very foundation of our system of government. It is true that there is a concept of res judicata – finality in judgement – for individual plaintiffs in civil and criminal cases. But if the courts in that process are going to engage in review of legislation and broad political issues affecting the entire country in order to resolve a case or controversy, there was never any understanding that we’d apply res judicata to judicial review.

The truth is that court opinions are not self-executing and universally binding as broad legal and political precedent on the other two branches. There are numerous tools at the disposal of Congress to prospectively and retrospectively check the judiciary through legislation, not by constitutional amendment, and the federal courts only have the jurisdiction vested in them by Congress.

Ultimately, each branch of government has a responsibility to interpret the Constitution as it relates to its respective powers, and each has tools and avenues through which to assert itself. The judiciary has the fewest and weakest, and the legislature has the strongest and most numerous. Judges can merely issue judgment in a case that has legitimate standing before a court of law. If the constitutional rationale used in a case in order to reach an opinion portends a specific precedent on a constitutional matter affecting the rest of the country and the other branches, it’s the right and responsibility of everyone to push back against that when they believe it is wrong.

That is the system of government we adopted in 1789, yet now the courts have sustained, enduring, and exclusive or final power to veto legislation or policies and can often even dictate new policies.

The question of who decides the Constitution was obvious to our Founders

From the beginning years of our republic until the 20th century, the question of who is the final arbiter of the Constitution was not an important question to answer. The disagreements over policy rarely spilled into disagreements over the Constitution, and in the few instances they did, they weren’t over broad and consequential issues. It wasn’t like today, when you have one side that believes what is antithetical to an inalienable right is a right and what is a right is not a right; what is a federal power belongs to the states and what belongs to the state is actually federal. You didn’t have people who believed that redefining marriage, life, human sexuality, and national borders is in the Constitution.

As such, when in the course of a case or controversy the courts opined on a constitutional question (which actually happened in the 1790s before Marbury), the other branches would usually (but not always) defer to the judiciary. The issues weren’t overly consequential, the opinions were often persuasive, and overall Congress was so powerful that it never feared, with the power to legislate and the power of the purse, that the courts would one day rule the country. Additionally, Congress regularly anchored everything it did to constitutional moorings and never dared outsource that to the Supreme Court. As the Congressional Research Service explains, “the early history of the United States is replete with examples of all three branches of the federal government playing a role in constitutional interpretation.”

There were some, especially Thomas Jefferson and the anti-federalists, who feared that judicial review would grow into into judicial exclusivity, but nobody ever thought the courts would be the final say, especially if they concocted revolutionary adulterations of the Constitution and the contours of fundamental rights.

Judicial supremacists as heirs to the Dred Scott legacy

Because the proponents of slavery viewed human beings as property, slavery was not only a political dispute but a constitutional one, as slaveholders asserted that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which barred slavery in most of the new territories, denied them their property rights. The Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that the Missouri Compromise indeed violated the constitutional property rights of Mr. Sandford. This was the first moment when it became relevant to ask who is the final arbiter of the Constitution, especially when the court was so wrong and with such devastating consequences. That was the critical point of debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Lincoln was right, yet both parties of the political swamp, including most of the “conservative” legal profession today, have adopted the Douglas/Dred Scott view.

At the first debate in Ottawa, Illinois, Douglas accused Lincoln of waging “warfare” against the Supreme Court, “the highest judicial tribunal on earth” whose “decision becomes the law of the land, binding on you, on me, and on every other good citizen whether we like it or not.”

Lincoln showed Douglas’s hypocrisy: that he never propagated such a novel and tyrannical notion of governance until he needed it to promote slavery, and that his entire career stood against this proposition. He noted how the very same Douglas who felt the court’s opinion – that banning slavery was akin to banning property rights — was “the law of the land” claimed to support the individual territories themselves banning slavery if they so chose. But if the Supreme Court’s ruling that black slaves were property was a self-executing Constitutional proclamation binding on every branch of government and universally binding on non-parties, then how could Douglas’s popular sovereignty get off the ground? That was the trap Lincoln set for Douglas throughout the infamous debates.

According to Lincoln, where the high court fits into the structure of constitutional construction is very simple. The Constitution, not any one branch of government, is the law of the land. Thus, when a court renders an opinion, it is only binding on that party and only serves as precedent within the judicial branch of government.

Despite the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln as president signed laws prohibiting slavery in the territories, and, as head of the executive branch, he not only declined to treat black people as property, he treated them as citizens and issued them official government documents, such as passports. Those issues are within the province of the other branches of government, who must interpret the Constitution as they understand it.

Sadly, not only did Lincoln lose the 1858 Senate election to Douglas, he lost the fight over what would eventually become the most consequential political question of our time. Our current view of the judiciary is a legacy of the insidious plot to maintain slavery. (For more from the author of “Our Founders Never Thought the Courts Had the Final Say — and Neither Should We” please click HERE)

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Confirmed: Democrats Coordinated Their Temper Tantrum at Kavanaugh Hearing, Guess Who Led the Way

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By Townhall. Democrats coordinated and planned over the long holiday weekend to obnoxiously interrupt the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The hearing started Tuesday morning and will likely run through the end of the week.

Right from the start, Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee repeatedly spoke out of order, personally attacked Chairman Chuck Grassley and demanded the hearing be adjourned. Cortney has the details covered here. . .

By 11 a.m., Kavanaugh still hadn’t given his opening statement. The hearing started at 9:30 a.m.

(Read more from “Confirmed: Democrats Coordinated Their Temper Tantrum at Kavanaugh Hearing, Guess Who Led the Way” HERE)

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Lindsey Graham Certain Kavanaugh ‘Is Going to Be on the Supreme Court’

By Fox News. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh “the single best legal mind of his generation,” adding he’s certain the judge “is going to be on the Supreme Court.”

Graham told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that Trump was the “big winner” in Wednesday’s hearing and that Democrats were the “big losers.” He said that Republicans have voted in favor of certain liberal judges in the past when the party was in the minority — but he claimed Democrats have been unwilling to do the same.

“I think the country is tired of the yelling and they’d like us to get things done. And, at times, Donald Trump drives me crazy, but he’s produced, and Kavanaugh is the single best legal mind of his generation. Any Republican president would’ve picked him.”

Graham went on to say that Kavanaugh is “equally qualified if not more” qualified than Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, both of whom were approved for the high court during the Obama administration. (Read more from “Lindsey Graham Certain Kavanaugh ‘Is Going to Be on the Supreme Court'” HERE)

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After Leftists Smear Woman at Kavanaugh Hearing as White Supremacist, Her Attorney Husband Issues Fierce Response

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As reported by The Daily Wire on Tuesday, leftists went full-crazy at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and, among other insane things, smeared a woman siting behind Kavanaugh as a white supremacist. The internet erupted with conspiracy theories that Zina Bash, a former Kavanaugh clerk, flashed a “white power” sign, apparently giving a nod and wink to her white supremacist, Kavanaugh-supporting brethren. (In reality, she randomly rested her right hand on left arm, but TRUMP!)

Leftist activist and serial fake news-spreader Amy Siskind was unsurprisingly one of the many, many hysterical leftists to take part in the shameful smearing:

What fresh hell is this!!!???
Kavanaugh’s assistant Zina Bash giving the white power sign right behind him during the hearing? This alone should be disqualify!!! pic.twitter.com/ZzXVqgTXhC

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) September 4, 2018

Hours later, Mrs. Bash’s husband, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas John Bash, unloaded on the despicable leftists spreading such falsehoods about his part-Mexican, part-Jewish wife. . .

Siskind later deleted the viral tweet, “which has become way too much of a distraction.” A screenshot can be viewed, below:

(Read more from “After Leftists Smear Woman at Kavanaugh Hearing as White Supremacist, Her Attorney Husband Issues Fierce Response” HERE)

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Bill Clinton’s Former Lawyer Endorses Trump Supreme Court Nominee Kavanaugh

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While several Democratic lawmakers push for obstructing the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s second U.S. Supreme Court justice pick, judge Brett Kavanaugh has earned praise from a number of individuals who know and have worked closely with him over the years.

One such recommendation came in the form of a letter to members of the U.S. Senate judiciary committee this week.

Bob Bennett, who represented then-President Bill Clinton during a high-profile sexual harassment case, said Kavanaugh was a promising young competitor working on the other side of the courtroom.

“I first crossed paths with Brett in the mid 1990s, when we found ourselves lined up on opposite sides of the decade’s biggest legal battle,” he said.

Bennett wrote that he was “serving as President Clinton’s personal lawyer in the Paula Jones case” while Kavanaugh “had just joined the Office of Independent Counsel under Ken Starr, then investigating the president.”

Though they were vociferous foes when presenting their cases, Bennett said he took away a respect for the manner in which Kavanaugh conducted himself.

Specifically, he pointed to the ethics the attorney demonstrated in what was a highly charged partisan climate, adding that Kavanaugh was able to “avoid falling prey” to political pressures.

“Brett’s integrity quickly won me over, and we became close friends despite our differences (and the differences between the Presidents we served),” Bennett said.

Bennett praised Trump’s pick as “the most qualified person any Republican president could possibly have nominated.”

Meanwhile, many in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing have begun to rally opposition to Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Capitol Hill, as reported by HuffPost.

Several groups are backing the growing effort to press Democrats for a firm statement of their intention to vote against him. Brian Fallon, a former Hillary Clinton spokesperson, issued a statement of support through his organization Demand Justice.

“The fight against Brett Kavanaugh is winnable but only if Senate Democrats quickly unite in opposition so we can focus on pressuring a Republican to break ranks,” he said. “At this point, it is absurd that there are still more than two dozen Democrats on the fence about Kavanaugh. He is the most unpopular Supreme Court nominee in 35 years and it is time to fight his nomination with the urgency it deserves.”

Some supporters of the effort say Democratic senators should ignore tradition dictating that they refrain from sharing an opinion on a Supreme Court nominee until a confirmation hearing has been conducted.

Advocacy group Indivisible cited President Barack Obama’s pick, who was not given a hearing by a GOP-controlled Congress, in a statement from associate policy director Elizabeth Beavers.

“We should ask Merrick Garland about standard Supreme Court procedure,” she said. “That’s not what we’re operating on.” (For more from the author of “Bill Clinton’s Former Lawyer Endorses Trump Supreme Court Nominee Kavanaugh” please click HERE)

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Desperation: Ludicrous Tactics of Kavanaugh Opponents Sink to New, Hilarious Low

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Read on for the baseball-related punchline, but first consider the shambolic state in which the Kavanaugh resistance finds itself a few weeks prior to his scheduled Senate hearings. Two major newspapers reviewed the available evidence, quizzed their sources, and reached nearly identical verdicts over the weekend: The organized Left’s opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is flagging, unfocused, and perfunctory — and even some the activists and partisans who’ve set out to derail his confirmation are privately conceding that their efforts will likely prove futile. The Washington Post reports that internecine blame games are already underway, as liberal activists grapple with the realities that are starting to set in. If you’re passionately anti-Kavanaugh, every line of this lede is pretty bleak:

Democrats have all but acknowledged that they are unable to stop the Senate from confirming Trump nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court this fall. Moderate Republican senators such as Susan Collins of Maine, the most closely watched GOP swing vote, are sending strong signals that they will back Kavanaugh. Several Democrats facing difficult reelections this year have indicated they are open to voting for the judge. And leaders of the resistance are already delivering post-mortem assessments and blaming fellow Democrats for a looming failure. Barring a major revelation, the Senate is poised to install the 53-year-old Kavanaugh on the high court and take the next step toward fulfilling President Trump’s pledge to remake the Supreme Court — and the wider federal judiciary, potentially for decades.

The piece tracks GOP moderate Sen. Susan Collins’ apparent journey toward a ‘yes’ vote, noting that she’s voted to confirm every single SCOTUS pick to make it to a floor vote during her tenure in office, regardless of the president’s partisan affiliation. It quotes Chuck Schumer lamenting the difficult dynamics of the fight (“we always maintained it was an uphill fight”) and defending his decision not to pressure his caucus by intensely whipping votes against Kavanaugh (“punishment is not how this place works”). And it chronicles the frustration of activists who stew over what they see as Democrats’ lack of resolve: Schumer “speaks and acts in contradictions,” one complains. Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, also blasts Senate Democrats for determining “out of the gate that this was an unwinnable fight.” Fallon has been reduced to impotent, furious pronouncements on Twitter:

(Read more from “Desperation: Ludicrous Tactics of Kavanaugh Opponents Sink to New, Hilarious Low” HERE)

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Did Democrats Overreach on Their Strategy to Block Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee?

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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.

(Read more from “Did Democrats Overreach on Their Strategy to Block Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee?” HERE)

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Kavanaugh Has His Most Important Meeting yet for the Supreme Court

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Judge Brett Kavanaugh met with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia for 90 minutes Monday, his first private interview with a Democratic lawmaker since his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Manchin, who is standing for re-election this November in a state President Donald Trump won by 40 percentage points, pressed the judge on health care, as another challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) advances through federal courts.

“Judge Kavanaugh and I had a productive meeting and talked about his experience, record and a variety of issues that will impact West Virginians, including his views on healthcare,” Manchin said after the interview. He noted another challenge to the ACA is currently advancing through the federal courts, which could imperil insurance coverage for some 800,000 of his constituents with pre-existing conditions.

Kavanaugh’s record with the ACA is somewhat complex. He was openly hostile to the law’s contraception mandate in a 2015 decision, arguing it placed a substantial burden on the rights of religious dissenters. However, in a 2011 opinion he declined to strike the ACA down, instead finding that the case before him should be dismissed for technical reasons.

In arguing for dismissal, Kavanaugh maintained that the ACA’s individual mandate — which requires people to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty — qualified as a tax for purposes of a federal law called the Anti-Injunction Act. One year later, a five-justice majority on the Supreme Court also concluded the mandate was a tax, but on different grounds than Kavanaugh. (Read more from “Kavanaugh Has His Most Important Meeting yet for the Supreme Court” HERE)

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