A fight over access to documents consumed the first hour of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, as Senate Democrats and a host of protesters interrupted the marathon proceedings.
Senate Democrats pushed to delay the hearing at its outset, raising objections to the release Monday of 42,000 pages of documents and citing the more than 100,000 pages withheld by the White House because of executive privilege.
“What are we trying to hide? What are we hiding? What’s being hidden?” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Tuesday.
[Opinion: Kick the audience out of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing already]
The battle over documents has been waging since the days following Kavanaugh’s nomination, as Judiciary Committee Democrats have been calling for the release of documents from Kavanaugh’s years working as staff secretary for President George W. Bush.
The National Archives has turned over thousands of pages of records related to Kavanaugh’s tenure as associate counsel, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, did not request documents from Kavanaugh’s three years as staff secretary, saying they were not necessary to understanding his legal thinking.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have protested the process for making public the documents, saying those stemming from Kavanaugh’s tenure as staff secretary are crucial to understanding his views on controversial policies from the Bush administration.
“I’m sorry to see the Senate Judiciary Committee descend this way. I felt privileged to serve here under both Republican and Democratic leadership for over 40 years,” Leahy said. “This is not the Senate Judiciary Committee I saw when I came to the United States Senate.”
At the start of the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., made a motion to adjourn the hearing, though Grassley denied his request, saying it was out of order.
All Democrats on the panel vocalized their opposition to the document process Tuesday, saying what was requested represents just a fraction of those from Kavanaugh’s tenure in the White House.
“Understand where we’re coming from. It’s not to create a disruption. It’s not to make this a very bad process,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee’s top Democrat, said. “It is to say ‘majority, give us the time to do our work so that we can have a positive and comprehensive hearing on the man who may well be the deciding vote.’”
In addition to protests from Senate Democrats, more than a dozen protesters interrupted the hearing throughout its first hour.
The protesters urged the senators to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination and called for the hearing to be postponed.
They were escorted from the hearing room by Capitol Police.
Grassley proceeded with Tuesday’s hearing despite the demonstrations from members of the Judiciary Committee and the public. His fellow Republicans rebuked the protests from Democrats, with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, saying the confirmation hearing was subject to “mob rule.”
“It’s hard to take it seriously when every single one of our colleagues in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Democrats side have announced their opposition to this nomination even before today’s hearing,” Cornyn said. “So It’s hard to take seriously their claim that somehow they can’t do their jobs because they’ve been denied access to attorney-client or executive privilege documents when they’ve already made up their mind before the hearing. There’s nothing fair about that.”
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing is expected to last four days, with the Supreme Court hopeful taking questions Wednesday and Thursday.
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