What the Minority Leader neglects to mention is, unlike Judge Kavanaugh, Justice Kagan hadn’t served as a judge before being nominated to the Supreme Court. Other than her materials she submitted as part of the Senate Judiciary Questionnaire for her nomination,
her White House Counsel’s Office and Domestic Policy Council documents among the only categories that could shed light on her legal thinking.
Justice Kagan had written or joined a grand total of zero judicial opinions before her nomination. In order to carry out our ‘advise and consent’ responsibility as senators, we needed to better understand her legal thinking and potential jurisprudence.
Judge Kavanaugh, by contrast, has authored over 300 judicial opinions in his 12 years on the bench. Over three hundred. That doesn’t include the hundreds of other decisions where he joined an opinion or order.
When you add those to the mix, that’s thousands of pages of judicial writing that the American people have access to at this exact moment.
Justice Kagan, of course, had zero pages of judicial opinions.
Justice Kagan, of course, had zero pages of judicial opinions.
This is in addition to the 6,168 pages of records Judge Kavanaugh just included in his response to the Senate Judiciary Questionnaire. Despite the fact that Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial record is much more substantial than Justice Kagan’s was,
I agree that we should still ask the White House for documents pertaining to Judge Kavanaugh’s time in the White House Counsel’s Office.
