Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., believes documents about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, won’t allow Democrats on his panel to make public could undermine Kavanaugh’s candidacy to be appointed to the nation’s highest court.
“I think that you could ask some very interesting questions about these documents that I’m unable to even say because I’m not able to them public,” Klobuchar said during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“It would certainly bolster, strongly bolster the arguments that I could make,” Klobuchar continued when asked whether those queries could potentially disqualify the federal appeals court judge from becoming a Supreme Court justice.
The Trump administration is exerting executive privilege over 100,000 pages of documents pertaining to Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House ahead of his Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to start on Tuesday. In addition, Klobuchar told NBC News there are 148,000 documents that have been provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee that members of the panel cannot disclose.
“This is not normal,” Klobuchar, who sits on the committee, added.
Kavanaugh needs a simple majority, or 51 votes, to be appointed to the Supreme Court after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Republicans in the upper chamber voted in April 2017 to change the rules so that justices could be confirmed without having to secure a supermajority of 60 votes. McConnell killing the possibility of a filibuster followed Democrats in 2013 also opting to evoke the “nuclear option” for former President Barack Obama’s nominees to lower courts.
“We still left the 60 votes in place for the Supreme Court and Mitch McConnell changed that,” Klobuchar said Sunday. “I would prefer to bring it back. We are where we are and now I don’t think anyone’s going to want to hamstring themselves.”
