Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., urged Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Tuesday to seek a delay in his own confirmation hearing until his full White House record is released.
“There are many people who are watching carefully. I might make a suggestion to you today, and it won’t be popular on either side of the aisle,” Durbin said Tuesday. “If you believe that your public record is one that you can stand behind and defend, I hope that at the end of this, you will ask this committee to suspend until we are given all the documents, until we have the time to review them, and then we resume this hearing.”
Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first day of his four-day confirmation hearing Tuesday.
The hearing convened at 9:30 a.m., but the proceeding quickly turned chaotic as more than a dozen protesters interrupted senators to voice their opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Senate Democrats on the committee also protested at the start of the hearing, and called for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to postpone it because of what they said is a lack of public documents from Kavanaugh’s record.
The main point of contention for Democrats was the release Monday night of 42,000 pages of documents stemming from Kavanaugh’s White House tenure, with no time to review them. They also objected to the withholding of more than 100,000 pages of records by the White House, which cited executive privilege.
Despite Democrats’ insistence Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing be postponed, Grassley rejected their requests. But in his opening remarks before the committee, Durbin appealed directly to Kavanaugh.
“For the sake of this nation, for the sanctity of the Constitution that we both honor, step up, ask this meeting, this gathering to suspend until all the documents of your public career are there for the American people to see,” he said.
The Illinois Democrat warned that continued efforts to conceal documents “raises a suspicion.”
President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, who retired at the end of July. If Kavanaugh is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court would shift decisively to the right.
