Anyone who has been in Washington for more than a decade knows that there is nothing more useless than the first day of a Supreme Court nomination hearing.
Usually, it consists of self-important speeches from senators that seem to stretch on to the crack of doom. If there’s anyone on the committee running for president — Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., we’re looking at you — he or she tends to be windier and say even more ridiculous things than the others.
At the end, lest everyone forget what the day is for, there’s usually a short speech from the nominee. The process would be shorter and better if all of the speeches were axed, or at most submitted in writing and entered into the Senate Judiciary Committee’s record, but that would deprive publicity-hungry pols of their grandstand.
This Tuesday might have set new records for uselessness because Democrats tried tirelessly — these men and women are not, to use Benjamin Disraeli’s phrase, a range of exhausted volcanoes — to occlude the public eye with a lot of smoke about information they claim bogusly is being hidden from them to prevent thorough scrutiny of the nominee.
They say less than 10 percent of relevant documents have been given to the committee, but the truth is, rather, that Democrats have failed to find any scrap of evidence to derail Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and now they’re clutching at straws. They don’t have any evidence against him, and they don’t have the votes to stop him. They themselves abolished most judicial filibusters in 2013, and they are now reaping what they sowed. Before the 2016 election, they promised to abolish Supreme Court filibusters when Hillary Clinton won, and they retook the Senate. They lost that election, so Republicans did it for them.
From the position of impotence they thought they were going to impose on their political opponents, Democrats have had to try and look tough to mollify their extreme donor base. It’s no accident that Sens. Booker and Harris sent out political fundraising emails during Tuesday’s hearing.
Committee Democrats’ tactic has been to make dilatory document requests they knew cannot be met, then spend the hearing itself pretending that failure to meet their impossible demands will strangle democracy in America.
There’s no standard checklist of documents to be presented for a Supreme Court nominee, but a record number have been given to the Senate about Kavanaugh — more than for the last five nominees combined.
Kavanaugh has been a judge 12 years and has amassed a long judicial record with hundreds of opinions he wrote or joined. He has also written articles, some controversial. He’s been on record from the time he worked with independent counsel Kenneth Starr toward the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Democrats decided that their best bet is to hint darkly that something about Kavanaugh is being kept hidden. In public, they fixate on millions of documents from the Bush administration that merely passed across his desk when he served as President George W. Bush’s staff secretary. Most of these papers say nothing about Kavanaugh, but they will contain deliberations by third parties, information about the president’s thinking, and probably also some sensitive national security information.
In the history of Supreme Court nominations, there is no precedent for demanding all documents from a nominee’s career. There are boundaries, especially those related to the burden of production and executive or attorney-client privilege, and they have been respected for past nominees with less lengthy public paper trails than Kavanaugh’s.
Democrats’ real intention, although they lack the means to carry it out, is to delay confirmation until after the coming midterm elections, in hope that they can win the Senate and kill the nomination. It isn’t going to happen.
There’s one more aspect to the Democrats’ cynicism that should help the Judiciary Committee and voters put things into perspective. Every single Democrat on the committee, and most Democrats in the Senate, have already publicly prejudged the nomination. Some did so even before he was named, so their request for mountains more information is completely disingenuous.
If one-fifth of them weren’t already running for president, there would be no point in any of them attending the hearing. Keep that in mind when you listen to them question Kavanaugh on Wednesday.
