In reality, more documents were produced on Judge Kavanaugh’s record than on any of the previous nominees’. Over a two-month period, Democrats had access to the following documents:
An 18,000-page response to the committee’s Senate Judiciary Questionnaire (SJQ)
All of Kavanaugh’s published writings
307 judicial opinions Kavanaugh wrote
Hundreds of opinions Kavanaugh joined
All available footage and transcripts of Kavanaugh’s public appearances
All books that used him as a resource
More than 500,000 pages of documents related to his past legal service in the executive branch
One-on-one meetings with Kavanaugh (65 senators took advantage of the opportunity).
Subsequently, senators heard thirty-two hours of testimony from Kavanaugh, then received responses to 1,300 post-hearing written questions. A memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans notes this was “more questions than have been asked of all prior Supreme Court nominees combined.”
Even the White House, whose right to withhold documents under executive privilege was held sacrosanct by these same Democrats during the Obama administration, reported having turned over more documents on Kavanaugh than on the five previous nominees combined. The opposition had to know that executive privilege would apply to some of the documents that they were requesting. Nevertheless, the Democrats insisted that Kavanaugh was hiding something.
Feinstein doubled down on the Schumer tweet, releasing a statement the same day with the same gaslighting technique Schumer had used to make the public question the facts:
Scheduling a hearing in early September, while more than 99 percent of Kavanaugh’s records are still unavailable, is not only unprecedented but a new low in Republican efforts to stack the courts.
Aside from the obvious hyperbole of suggesting that Republicans filling Supreme Court vacancies constitutes “stacking the courts,” Feinstein’s numbers are problematic. The Washington Post called out the obvious exaggeration in her messaging, noting that she had to massage the numbers by excluding large volumes of documents produced to the Senate, but not made public. The Post also noted her false assumption that the White House record being held back was millions of pages more than it actually was. Furthermore, the Post correctly pointed out that many of the records not produced were duplicates of emails sent and received among multiple people.
Democrats would have you believe they were waiting to assiduously review every last page of every last document so they could be certain how they would vote. But if that were actually true, they probably would have shown up to see the documents that had already been produced. Especially the ones designated “committee confidential” that were considered too sensitive for public release. Did they? You won’t read about it in any mainstream source, but none other than Chairman Grassley himself provided the answer just before the hearings got under way:
“The most sensitive presidential records remain committee confidential under federal law just as they were during the nominations of Kagan or Gorsuch,” he said. “But we have expanded access to these documents. Also, instead of just providing access to committee members, we’ve provided access to all 100 senators. Instead of just providing access to a very few committee aides, we’ve provided access to all committee aides. And instead of just providing access to physical binders of paper, we’ve provided 24/7 digital and searchable access. This is unprecedented access to committee confidential material. I would also like to add that my staff set up work stations and have been available 24/7 to help senators who are not on the committee access confidential materials . . . but not one senator showed up.”
Any journalist with a laptop and a shred of integrity could have blown up the Senate Democrats’ false narrative with one story. (Of course, few did.) The document demands were nothing more than a ruse to delay the hearings and prop up the false narrative that Kavanaugh must be hiding something. But that would not stop Judiciary Committee Democrats and 2020 presidential hopefuls from doubling down on the overreach in the opening day of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
If this play sounds familiar, it’s because Schumer ran it again immediately after Attorney General William Barr released his summary of the Mueller report in late March 2019. Knowing that an investigation involving a foreign power would necessarily have to be redacted and that grand jury material is never made public, Democrats made a show of demanding the entire Mueller report with underlying documentation. They know it can’t all be produced. They don’t even necessarily disagree with the reasons. But if they want to run with a narrative that the Trump administration is “hiding something,” they have to create the appearance that they didn’t get everything they needed.
To this point in the confirmation process, the behavior of Democrats trying to stop the Kavanaugh nomination was aggressive, opportunistic, and misleading. But not necessarily unprecedented. All of that would change once the hearings got under way. That’s when a new narrative would need to be built—a narrative powerful enough to take down a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee.
The first day of the confirmation hearings was carefully scripted by Schumer, according to CNN. Citing an anonymous source, CNN reported that Schumer himself had worked through the preceding weekend with Judiciary Committee Democrats to lay out a plan. “Democrats agreed to protest the document issues at the beginning of the hearing with the goal of slowing down the process,” CNN reported.
That’s when the real show began. Who can forget the drama of those hearings and their immediate aftermath, with all the suspense of carefully timed plot twists, last-minute bombshells, emotional outbursts, and Oscar-worthy performances by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee? Perhaps the influence of the Democrats’ Hollywood acolytes had rubbed off on them.
The drama was just getting started. Cue the choreography between Senate Democrats and nonprofit political groups. On the opening day of the hearing, Politico reported, “They created a spectacle by hijacking the hearing as soon as it started and calling for the committee to adjourn against a backdrop of liberal activists being arrested in protest.”
The DNC’s surrogate Planned Parenthood was in the thick of the battle, announcing on the hearing’s opening day a six-figure ad buy against Kavanaugh in Washington, D.C., and Alaska, where moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski was expected to be a swing vote. In a tweet on the hearing’s opening day, the nonprofit posted:
The disruptions we’re seeing during Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing pale in comparison to the disruptions and lengths women already take to access safe, legal abortion. This is what the resistance looks like, and we’re going to fight like hell to #StopKavanaugh.
Yes, they would. At one point in the hearings, Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina referenced a tweet from NBC suggesting that the protests, which were supposedly in response to a late document released the night before, had been coordinated by Leader Schumer in a conference call prior to that document’s release. He asked point-blank whether committee Democrats were involved in that call. Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois admitted, “Mr. Chairman, there was a phone conference yesterday and I can tell you at the time of the phone conference many issues were raised.” The protests were just part of the script.