When given the chance to question Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., dedicated most of his time to griping about a 2001-2003 incident in which Leahy’s emails were stolen. It was a bizarre line of questioning that recalled an ugly incident, which Leahy probably shouldn’t want to revisit.
Here’s what happened: After Sen. Jim Jeffords switched from Republican to Democrat in 2001, he flipped the Senate in the process. When Democrats took over the Judiciary Committee, they failed to build a firewall between the Democratic part of the committee server and the Republican part. A young Republican IT staffer figured this out, and a senior staffer named Manny Miranda exploited that oversight to go and get Democratic documents.
This wasn’t quite hacking, but it was unethical snooping — equivalent to opening an unlocked file cabinet and looking at files in a colleague’s office. I was involved in this fracas and even got a call from law enforcement about it, because Miranda had fed one of these stolen memos to me, without telling me the source.
Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t involved in this breach. Leahy presented no evidence that Kavanaugh knew about this breach. So it’s hard to imagine its relevance to Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court. The old story does, however, shed light on how Democrats handle Republican judicial nominees.
‘Most of Clinton’s nominees were impeachable. … most of Bush’s nominees are Nazis.’
One Judiciary Committee memo (memorialized in the Congressional Record) suggested making an example out of a Bush nominee — letting them through, but only after brutally lambasting them. It had some colorful language. It granted that Bill Clinton’s controversial nominees were “impeachable,” but asserted that “most of Bush’s nominees are Nazis.”
Timing abortion fights for before the elections
Michael McConnell was a Bush nominee eventually confirmed by voice vote. The Democratic strategy memo on him made it clear that Democrats had no real reason to oppose him, but instead saw something to gain from holding him up: “McConnell will also be difficult to defeat,” one memo read. “While he has a clear anti-choice record, he has the strong support of some Democrats and progressives. McConnell’s clear anti-choice record, however, makes him a good nominee to bring up before the November elections.”
That is, to fight a losing fight over a clearly qualified judge in order to rile up the abortion lobby before the election.
‘[E]specially dangerous, because … he is Latino’
The Dems’ biggest fight in Bush’s first term was over the nomination of Miguel Estrada. Democrats derailed his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court because they feared that allowing a Hispanic conservative to that perch would make it too easy for Bush or some later Republican president to nominate him to the Supreme Court.
A staffer for Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., wrote to a memo saying liberal groups had “identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”
And so they did torpedo Estrada, demanding his privileged memos as solicitor general as a condition for consideration. This is how Democrats’ racial politics work — they train particular hatred on minorities and women who think independently of them and hold conservative views.
That ugly truth, and nothing about Kavanuagh, is what the purloined memos taught us.
