Pro Publica received a lot of well-earned criticism for its nutty crowdsourced fishing expedition asking Nationals fans to search for photos of Kavanaugh at baseball games in the hopes they’ll uncover something nefarious.
But Senate Democrats are pushing ahead with their own desperate strategy to bury the confirmation process under a mountain of irrelevant document requests, with about the same likelihood of finding anything significant.
Here’s where we stand:
Judge Kavanaugh has served for twelve years on the D.C. Circuit, widely regarded as the most important federal appellate court in the country. In that time he has authored 307 opinions, all available in the public domain, and signed onto hundreds more. His opinions have been so influential and persuasive that on more than a dozen occasions the Supreme Court has adopted his reasoning – often vindicating his dissenting positions. His record has been supplemented by the most extensive bipartisan questionnaire the Senate Judiciary Committee has ever received, his answers running more than 100 pages themselves and with more than 17,000 pages of appendices making an exhaustive review of his previous legal work, publications, and public speaking.
A robust judicial record is naturally the major point of reference for anyone interested in a nominee’s judicial philosophy. As both Senator Schumer and Senator Leahy have noted, a judge’s public record from his or her time on the bench is the best indication of how they will serve on the Supreme Court. But, caught between a nominee that shows every sign of cruising toward confirmation and an increasingly desperate and radicalized base, Democrats are now hoping that creating drama surrounding the release of documents from Kavanaugh’s time working in the Bush White House will create delay and distract from his unparalleled qualifications and stellar judicial record.
At the outset it’s obvious that none of this is in good faith, because those most vocally demanding documents have already announced their opposition to Kavanaugh. Moments after he was nominated, Democrats were trampling each other in an effort to be the first on the record opposing Judge Brett Kavanaugh. They had apparently already done their homework on a nominee who, as part of the most transparent Supreme Court nomination process in history, had been publicly announced as a shortlister months before, giving ample time for liberals to ramp up their opposition research.
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