As September 4 approaches and Senators begin to gear up for the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, many pundits have begun speculating on what topics the public might expect to see lawmakers ask the would-be Justice of the nation’s highest court.
Like all confirmation hearings of this type, politicians from the party he was nominated by will be seeking assurances that he will side with them, while politicians from the opposing party will want to be sure that he will not side with them at the expense of the Constitution.
And despite the fact that Republicans are the party that actually coined the term “activist judges,” the fact is that conservative justices have done far more legislating from the bench in the last generation than any previous crop of judges has ever come close to. From widening the intended scope of the Citizens United case so that it made corporate political donations unlimited to the recent decision on Donald Trump’s so-called “travel ban,” the activist Republicans who have held the court’s majority for more than three decades have been decidedly conservative in their adjudications.
But in the confirmation process, it is widely expected that documentation on the nominees will be made widely available for lawmakers to consider in advance of their votes. And while it’s no secret that the Trump administration has been recalcitrant in its opposition to letting the public know that Kavanaugh, for example, believes you cannot indict a sitting President — an opinion that may greatly benefit this particular officeholder — it’s practically unheard of for a nominating President to simply stifle information that is already compiled about the nominee.
Yet that’s exactly what Trump is doing.
According to a Friday evening report from the Associated Press, Trump is withholding more than one hundred thousand pages of material regarding Brett Kavanaugh compiled by lawyers for former President George W. Bush, for whom Kavanaugh served as White House Staff Secretary during his presidency. Attorney Bill Burck told the Senate Judiciary Friday that Bush had directed his team to err “on the side of transparency and disclosure, and we believe we have done so.” But Burck went on to say that Trump “has directed that we not provide these documents.”
Everyone expects that Kavanaugh will say he’ll “uphold the law as it is written” as it pertains to abortion and unions and gun rights, then vote with the conservative majority to do whatever Republicans want. That part really isn’t even in question.
So what on earth is so damaging in the documentation of Brett Kavanaugh that Donald Trump is citing “presidential privilege” in order to keep it from both the Judiciary Committee and the American public?
Featured image via screen capture
