Here Are Five Ways Democrats Now Will Try to Block Kavanaugh

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has not yet even been questioned, but already Senate Democrats have telegraphed the lines of attack they plan to pursue this week in a long-shot bid to derail him.

Opening statements by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday focused a great deal on whether President Donald Trump’s administration has been sufficiently forthcoming about Kavanaugh’s paper trail and touched on whether Trump should even be allowed to make the appointment and whether the nominee is truthful.

Democrats oddly spent relatively little time on what experts consider the best guide to Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy — his 12-year record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the more than 300 decisions in which he participated.

Here are the five most prominent lines of attack that likely will continue to pop up during this week’s proceedings concerning Kavanaugh (pictured above):

1.) They’re hiding the documents. Democrats delayed the start of the hearing in a vain attempt to postpone it over concerns that the administration has not produced enough documents from Kavanaugh’s tenure as an aide and lawyer in President George W. Bush’s administration.

“I appeal to be recognized on your sense of decency and integrity,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). “Even the documents that you have requested, Mr. Chairman, even the ones that you sent, the limited documents that you have requested, this committee has not received.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained that the panel had decided to “cast aside tradition in favor of speed.”

She said 93 percent of the records from Kavanaugh’s time as staff secretary in the White House had not been turned over, and 96 percent were not made public because the committee had placed restrictions on some of the documents that have been produced.

Added Booker: “What is the rush? What are we trying to hide by not having the documents out front? What is the rush? What are we hiding by not having those documents come out?”

Grassley countered that the committee had received more pages of documents “than the last five Supreme Court nominees combined.”

2.) Trump is a criminal. Democrats argued Trump should not even be allowed to make the appointment.

“You are the nominee of President Donald John Trump,” Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said. “This is a president who’s shown us repeatedly that he’s contemptuous of the rule of law. He has said and done things as president, which we’ve never seen before in our history.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Kavanaugh is the nominee of a president who has been “named in open court as having directed criminal activity,” a reference to the claim of lawyer Michael Cohen that he violated campaign finance law under orders from Trump.

“If you are in that seat, sir, because the White House has big expectations that you will protect the president from the due process of law, that should give every senator pause.”

“If you are in that seat, sir, because the White House has big expectations that you will protect the president from the due process of law, that should give every senator pause,” he said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) expanded on the issue of presidential power. She pointed to a law review article by Kavanaugh outlining his view that presidents should not be burdened with civil complaints or criminal investigations while they are in office.

“To my colleagues, what concerns us is that during this critical juncture in history, the president has hand-picked a nominee to the court with the most expansive view of presidential power possible, a nominee who has actually written that the president, on his own, can declare laws unconstitutional,” she said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called Trump an “unindicted co-conspirator” and added that no one should be able to select a judge for his own case. “That’s what the president’s essentially doing here,” Blumenthal said.

3.) Kavanaugh is a liar. Durbin hammered Kavanaugh over his testimony at his 2006 confirmation hearing to examine his credentials to serve as an appellate court judge.

Durbin at the time asked Kavanaugh about a memo written by Jay Bybee, now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, when he was a Bush administration lawyer. The memo concerned the administration’s policy regarding “enhanced interrogation techniques” for detainees in the war on terror.

Durbin asked Kavanaugh if Bybee’s memo should have disqualified him.

“I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants or — and so I do not have the involvement with that,” he testified.

Later, it came to light that Kavanaugh had told Bush administration officials that his old boss, then-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, would not buy the argument that the courts cannot review decisions on interrogations.

Based on that, a theme emerged among progressives that Kavanaugh’s answer amounted to perjury. Durbin has not forgotten the exchange, and he said Monday that the nominee acknowledged in a meeting after his nomination to the high court that he was involved in the discussions over detention policies.

“For 12 years, you could have apologized and corrected this record, but you never did,”
 he said. “Instead, you and your supporters have argued that we should ignore that simple declarative sentence and somehow conclude your words mean something far different.”

4.) Kavanaugh is hostile to the rights of women (and the little guy). Feinstein focused on a judgment Kavanaugh rendered last year in an abortion-related case.

In Garza v. Hargan, the appeals court upheld the right of an illegal immigrant detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to obtain a tax-funded abortion.

Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that the government could hold the teenage illegal immigrant until she got a sponsor to take her for an abortion.

“The argument rewrites Supreme Court precedent, and, if adopted, we believe would require courts to determine whether a young woman had a sufficient support network when making her decision even in cases where she has gone to court,” Feinstein said.

Feinstein said Kavanaugh’s dissent calls into question the nominee’s assertion that Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a right to abortion, is “settled law.” That is not the right question, the senator said.

“The question is really, do you believe it’s correct law?” she said. “And that’s Roe v. Wade. I was in the ’50s and ’60s active, first as a student at Stanford. I saw what happened to young women who became pregnant.”

5.) Kavanaugh is out of the mainstream. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said he had urged Trump to nominate a justice who could draw consensus support from both sides. “Judge Kavanaugh, I’m concerned you might not be that nominee.”

Related: Dems Try to Derail Kavanaugh Hearing Before It Begins

Coons said Kavanaugh has dissented more frequently than any other appellate judge elevated to the high court since 1980.

“Your dissents reveal some views and positions that fall well outside the mainstream of legal thought,” he said.

Whitehouse said Republican-appointed justices since John Roberts became chief justice have stuck together on 5-4 votes 73 times in favor of what the Democrat senator described as corporate or Republican interests.

“Every time a big Republican corporate or partisan interest is involved, the big Republican interest wins,” he said. “Every time … Every damned time.”