Why Are Republicans Covering Up Brett Kavanaugh’s Past? nyti.ms/2OMrabE
2/"Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters have spent the last month lavishing him with acclaim. He’s a legal superstar, they say, one of the most qualified Supreme Court nominees in history. So why are Senate Republicans so afraid of letting Americans learn more about him? After what
3/"they did to Judge Merrick Garland in 2016 — obliterating Senate tradition by outright ignoring President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nomination for partisan political gain — you might think it would be hard for Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and
4/"Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to inflict any more damage on the court. Surprise! They’re now running the most secretive and incomplete confirmation process in modern history. They scrambled to set the start of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing for
5/"Sept. 4, even as they have refused multiple requests by their Democratic colleagues to see more than one million documents covering his years as White House staff secretary to President George W. Bush. Judge Kavanaugh has called that job, which he held from 2003 to 2006,
6/"“the most interesting and informative” of his career in terms of preparing for his work on the bench. These documents could contain important information about his role in some of the Bush administration’s most controversial actions, including its warrantless wiretapping
7/"program and its torture policy. Judge Kavanaugh was evasive during his 2006 confirmation hearing for a seat on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., where he currently sits. He denied any involvement in those policies, but Democratic senators have long believed that
8/"his answers to them were, at best, misleading. And at least one former Bush official appeared to directly contradict him. So what was his true role? The documents may or may not answer that question definitively, but we’ll never know without seeing them.
9/"The documents could also shed light on Judge Kavanaugh’s ability to be impartial on important legal issues that may come before the Supreme Court. Before becoming a judge, he was a loyal Republican warrior, working on the Starr Report that recommended the impeachment of
10/"President Bill Clinton and helping Mr. Bush’s team during the 2000 election recount. He worked for the Bush administration during its push for, among other things, severe restrictions on women’s reproductive rights and a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
11/"The Senate should have access to anything in the judge’s record that reveals pre-existing views on issues like these. This is precisely the kind of information about a Supreme Court nominee that senators need to consider before voting to provide a lifetime seat on the
12/"nation’s highest court. It would be a dereliction of their constitutional duty to do less. Indeed, Senate Republicans rightly demanded, and got, comprehensive information on Mr. Obama’s two successful nominees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
13/"And yet, to everyone who now requests this basic information about Judge Kavanaugh, Mr. McConnell and Mr. Grassley say, take a hike. Under normal circumstances, documents relating to Supreme Court nominees with federal government experience are released by nonpartisan
14/"researchers at the National Archives. They take requests from the Senate and send over whatever they deem relevant. That’s the process set out by the Presidential Records Act, a federal law that has been followed for every recent Supreme Court nominee, including President
15/"Trump’s first pick, Neil Gorsuch. Judge Kavanaugh’s paper trail is far longer than those of prior nominees; the archives hold six million to seven million documents related to him. Mr. Grassley has requested only about 900,000 of them, none relating to his time as staff
16/"secretary. The archives staff has said it needs until late October to complete its review. So Mr. Grassley’s committee is instead getting the Kavanaugh documents directly from William Burck, a lawyer working for Mr. Bush — and not by any measure a neutral reviewer.
17/"Mr. Burck — who served under Judge Kavanaugh in the White House and may well be named in many of the withheld documents — should be reviewing them only for possible assertions of executive privilege. Instead, he has chosen to withhold large numbers for no clear reason.
18/"To date, he has provided about 240,000 documents, many of which are irrelevant or duplicative. About 40,000 pages, for example, consist of copies of a single email from Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Mr. Grassley argues that the Senate has already gotten
19/"more documents on Judge Kavanaugh than it did for Justice Sotomayor or Justice Kagan, who was President Obama’s solicitor general when she was nominated. But 99 percent of Justice Kagan’s White House record was made public before her hearing. For Judge Kavanaugh,
20/"the proportion is around 2 percent. This stonewalling by Republican leaders is so extreme that Democratic senators have been reduced to filing unheard-of requests for the missing documents under the Freedom of Information Act — a process that can take many months.
21/"On Wednesday, the National Archives distanced itself from this shady process, calling it “something that has never happened before,” and saying Mr. Burck’s work “does not represent the National Archives.” Republicans have had the nerve to complain that Democrats are trying to
22/"slow down the confirmation process. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called it an “unprecedented” degree of stalling. But everyone knew about Judge Kavanaugh’s lengthy paper trail; Mitch McConnell was reported to have initially opposed
23/"Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for that very reason. Either way, what’s the rush? We don’t recall Republicans expressing concern over delaying a confirmation when they were blocking Judge Merrick Garland." ~Editorial Board, NYT, 8/17/18
