It didn’t take long for proceedings to heat back up as the first day of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings resumed after lunch, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley reopened the hearing by taking the committee’s Democrats to task for unfair accusations against Kavanaugh and the four current conservative members of the Supreme Court.
“This issue has never come up from my colleagues, but I thought as I sat here and listened to some people criticize the Supreme Court for in some sense being bought. … Whenever the president criticizes the judiciary or judicial decisions, we hear wails of anguish from my Democratic colleagues,” Grassley said. “They attack the president for threatening the independence and the integrity of the judiciary, and they applaud the judiciary for standing up to the president.”
Growing angry, Grassley continued: “I just listened to some of my colleagues here, one of them spent 18 minutes attacking the personal integrity of justices of the Supreme Court. He said that
five justices had been bought and sold by private interest. He accused them of deciding cases to the benefit of favored parties. So I think it’s pretty clearly a double standard, and we shouldn’t have to tolerate such a double standard.”
Grassley was referring to remarks made an hour before by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who used his opening statement to take aim at the court’s conservative bloc, which he called the “Roberts Five.” Whitehouse accused the bloc of “going off on partisan excursions” at the command of “the big funders and influencers of the Republican party.”
“When the Roberts Five saddles up, these so-called conservatives are anything but judicially conservative,” Whitehouse said. “They readily overturn precedent, toss out statutes passed by wide bipartisan margins, and decide on broad constitutional issues they need not reach. Modesty, originalism, stare decisis, all these supposedly conservative judicial principles, all have the hoofprints of the Roberts Five all across there backs, wherever those principles got in the way of wins for the Big Republican interests.”
Whitehouse went on to sketch an ominous picture of a vast right-wing judicial conspiracy under which “big business and partisan groups” fund nonprofits like the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, to strong-arm their nominees onto the courts.
Grassley’s rebuke of Whitehouse wasn’t his first attempt to wrest the proceedings back to regular order. The hearing got off to a rocky start when a succession of Democrats took the floor to demand the hearing be postponed before Grassley could even gavel in, a tactic which led Republican senator John Cornyn to protest that Democrats were exercising “mob rule” and that “if this were a court of law,” the Democrats “would be held in contempt.”
For a time, Grassley tolerated the interruptions, saying it would be smoother to hear the Democrats out than to try to run roughshod over their protests. But he grew irritable as the repetitious objections piled up.
“I’m not going to entertain any of the motions you’re making; we’re not in executive session. I think we ought to level with the American people—do you want this to go on all day?” Grassley said. “Every one of you said during the Justice Gorsuch hearing, every one of you prefaced your comments on how fair I was in running that hearing. Now this is the same Chuck Grassley that ran the Gorsuch hearings. I’d like to run this hearing the same way, if you’ll give me the courtesy of doing it.”
