[inaudible conversations] good evening everyone can you hear me okay?

about now? that is better. thank you for coming i am told - - co-owner of the city book stop i'm happy to have everyone here tonight is anybody here for the first time? one person. welcome. we are very glad you're here normally we have half the crowd but this is very much a hometown crowd this evening. and i just want to say a heartfelt thank you for supporting so a few logistics first of all please silence your cell phone when i forget to say that i always regret it.

books are for sale upstairs if you have it purchased a book if you haven't you'll have time after the talk we will just do the sighting right here. so moving on to tonight's event majority of you here know car also a very short and sweet bio. from the new york times serving as a washington editor at the time his chief congressional correspondent

for judicial confirmation and we will have time for audience questions after the talks to take advantage of this opportunity for all the inside information that you would like to get. please join me in welcoming karl. [applause] >> i have to say this is kind of an odd experience and know almost everybody in here quite well, so very hometown crowd. it's great. i'm sure many of you aren't supposed i've actually written a book. lots of familiar faces and i also want to note c-span is

recording and will air the show. thank you c-span. i am a huge c-span supporter and doing off with them. they are great people. let's talk about the book called confirmation bias and a lot of people have been asking me about the title. it was actually proposed by one of my agents whose a very good writer himself and when we were brainstorming title ideas. i thought it was perfect for a couple of reasons. people look at it and what does that actually mean, it's also one of the complicated aspects of this whole fight i talk about in the book. both parties, democrats and republicans feel that they are aggrieved in the confirmation

fights that have been going on since basically the late 60s. to some degree they are right parties have been treated badly by the other in the confirmation process. and in doing so they've inflicted a lot of damage on each other, the nomination process, the senate and government of the united states. it is a big problem going forward. she mentioned fraud and that is a good way of thinking about it i will talk about that going forward. what happened to come and in and everybody sees this on capitol hill, everybody thinks they've been taken advantage of, treated badly so what happens is when they get the chance to do this to the other side, they do it, and that's what's happened here is it has just become a corrupt process. february, 2016-an 2016-and the e through an extraordinary set of circumstances and what i say in

the book and i say this several times, a snap decision changed the course of history, i'm not exaggerating and i'm going to prove that to you here tonight. february was a very eventful day for a lot of reasons it i was te saturday before valentine's day during the congressional recess i was at band practice, and that is as we know now the day that antonin scalia died or was found dead in a luxury hunting lodge in texas under kind of strange circumstances. i will say people always ask me about scalia, was there a murder or some conspirac conspiracy ths related to this and i talk to people at the highest levels of the government of th at the timd none of them suspect any foul play. you will find this on the internet, but he was an older guy, he'd like to smoke and drink and wasn't very healthy and no one suspected any foul

play. so, he's found dead in his room, the presidential suite at this resort, and that set off a lot of activity as i said i was at band practice, we finished and my phone blew up like what happened. mitch mcconnell, the kentucky republican and majority leader r of the senate at the time was in the caribbean on what turned out to be his annual beach visit. i was surprised to hear that he had an annual beach visit. i think that his wife liked the beach, the secretary. as i say end of -- in the become a key isn't the kind of guy resort around the pool, but at the beach, he was that he got the word as i described in the book being of a scalia family but the justice had died and so

normally in these cases, you know, it is such a big figure on the national stage there is a morning ma period everybody wans to talk about his life and they leave the politics out of it, but of course a lot of people here that have worked in congress and know about this. on the inside, everybody is talking about the politics and that is just the way that it does but it's like good taste to hold back and not immediately start talking about politics. even in the media we do it. i'm sitting at home trying to digest this. can we really start talking about filling the vacancy now would we have to wait again. as it turns out, this wasn't one of those cases where anyone was willing to wait. i'm going to read a little bit about this.

as i said he sat in his hotel room transfixed by reports that the hunting lodge in texas and the first thoughts were his own dealings beginning with his days as a lonely staffer in the shadow of three impressive officials of the department of justice and the other one for lawrence silverman and robert bork. i remember being intimidated by the intelligence of these guys interacting with each other every morning and then he told me this in an interview, about a year and a half ago he was the first person i interviewed for the buck because i knew i had to have mitch mcconnell's story to tell the story correctly. ten years later he was in the senate able to enthusiastically support the nomination to the supreme court by ronald reagan. the two developed a warm personal relationship entity with dying together occasionally.

the death represented a huge loss and clearly this was somebody of the oliver wendell holmes john marshal class. a big, big deal. this being mitch mcconnell a political animal through and through, he put aside political emotion to zero in on what really mattered, who and what would come next. his second thought was to immediately turn to the politics of the situation he said the first thing that came into my mind is that i knew if the shoe was on the other foot, they wouldn't fill the vacancy coming and i knew it for sure. sitting there on the caribbean suite thinking if this happened and republican president democratic senate 11 months left in the president's term, the democrats would obviously not go

out there. i get asked this question a lot what do i think the democrats would have done in the same situation because we know that it came up biden, schumer in earlier talks suggested they wouldn't do it which became a big talking point. my experience that they caved because that is what they do they wouldn't have been able to sustain this blockade. they just wouldn't have done it. the democrats are pro-government and we will never know what happened. barney frank gave a great quote one time putting the republicans in charge of the government is like putting me in charge of the ms. america contest. i will do it, but i really won't be into it. [laughter] i don't know what would have happened.

mitch mcconnell is thoroughly convinced that it would have been the same result. he set in motion an extraordinary chain of events, so a lot is going on tonight. saturday night a lot going on for this is why things happen. i am sitting there right before six and i get this now famous e-mail from the majority's office says scalia died, we need to appreciate his service. we also need to recognize that they are not going to be able to fill the seat. it's so close to the election, we need to let people decide whe who will fill the supreme court seats. obama is leaving january 20 the next year. it's not like the moving van is in a circle of the white house for the lack of matter.

this night is extraordinary. everything that went on and explains how this all played out. so, mcconnell is down there and there's a republican primary debate that night in south carolina coming into this is a huge thing that drove everyone's decision-making that night. as he is weighing up the traces of how to do this, mcconnell talks to josh holmes who was his chief of staff operative and now runs a private strategy firm. he's on the phone with mcconnell and says if you were going to do this strategy and we prevent them from going forward, you need to do it fast because there is a presidential primary debate that night. ted cruz is in it and is a former supreme court clerk has a lot on the judiciary committee and a lot of experience in the a and ithearea and if this becomes idea to block the nominee, the

republicans aren't going to let him do it because nobody wants to do his bidding for him, so that's why mcconnell acted so quickly. he needed to get out in front of this. this. sosuccumb everybody's looking at his death and they know that it's going to be a big thing in the debate to try to strategize around it. so another person who is strategizing around the debate is donald trump. so, don mcgann is a major character in the book, very interesting guy, of course he was a trump campaign attorney, just to be on the fec, had been appointed by george w. bush and on this mitch mcconnell's help. i called him a radical libertarian. he was a sort of anti-bureaucratic person and when he got on the fec and became the chairman.

that is what he wanted to do and that is what such mcconnell wanted them to do. he knows a lot about the nomination process having been through it himself and he knows a lot about conservative jurisprudence that he is talking to trump so here's what happened between donald trump and don mcgann. the campaign lawyer was driving along route 50 with a weekend gig at a. he glanced at eight from his

wife and he died, she wrote. shocked, she came an, shaken any the news began knew that his candidate might be the disadvantaged by the senators that had more experience with judicial politics. he was particularly worried about cruz who served on the judiciary committee and also clerked on the court for the chief justice william rehnquist. he was still hanging on as a rival and potential conservative alternative to trump and would inevitably try to capitalize on the political implications of selena's death. he called him to warn them not to be the first to politicize his passing. what about putting out some names, he asked, instinctively recognizing that the prospective nominees might go over well with

the audience that he was courting. he agreed that was a good idea and ran through some possibilities. brett kavanaugh, he offered as a first name that came to his mind, promoting the judge recognized in washington as a rising conservative star of the federal bench. he and trump kicked around a few others including the appeals court judges of alabama and diane sykes of wisconsin, two of the hardline conservatives. as they wait out the pros and cons, the candidate and lawyer concluded that it wasn't the best time for trump to embrace kavanagh a washington insider and george w. bush appointee to the court court but have also pd the chief justice john roberts and other currently in the republican disfavor for upholding the new health care law. the moderator of cbs news opened the debate at with a moment of silence for scalia to the silence didn't last long. he asked trump if with 11 months to go in his hypothetical presidential term he would bow to the democratic demands that

he not fourth a nominee for the vacancy from trump. if i were president now i'd certainly want to try to nominate a justice, he acknowledged. i'm sure president obama will try to do it. i hope that our senate is going to be able in the entire group is going to be able to do something about it and by doing something about it, he meant doing nothing about it so this was from the get-go and right from the get-g get go brett kavh isn't it interesting. when he was sworn in, he was in the chamber by kavanaugh in 2006 and is walking out with shannon and his wife that i've known for a long time as well. turned to her and said he's going to be on the supreme court someday but didn't know he would be to be debate goes o going toe supreme court. this is the beginning of the famous list for trump. the idea of putting forward some

names to reassure conservatives that were worried about trump at this point. he'd been a democrat in new york and contributed to planned parenthood. his sister was a federal judge in the new jersey pennsylvania district and ruled on some abortion rights issues he would either support his sister or somebody like his sister and was using this pretty well. one way to stop this was to start throwing out names of conservatives. because of his sister being there, he kind of got the federal judiciary's got a little more than he got other parts of the government, trust me, at that point. she didn't understand it

perfectly though where he's talking about the bills that his sister signed as the judge, so that didn't happen. but this was. the book makes the case that this vacancy in his ability to use the listin list into some or things was crucial and probably instrumental. that's what i mean by making history. i think that if this hadn't happened, there is a good chance he wouldn't have been elected and people tal we will talk aboe about that. he would have gotten his pick we are talking about the complete opposite another dimension somewhere. here's this vacancy and they have to figure out a way to get them in there. he is getting the rise playing

golf and everybody is out. so they are getting the news out there and they are astonished that mcconnell has come out so quickly and said we are not going to let you fill this vacancy. there is a debate on whether they should issue a statement or go on video because this is quickly getting out of control. chuck schumer called dennis, the chief of staff achief of staff o is in dc at his kids soccer game and i would ask everybody what they were whewherethey were whes because it is pretty interesting he'sees that his kids soccer gae they said you won't be so this vacancy anthoughthis vacancy and that's what we are going to talk

about. they were going to have a hard time accepting how radical the republicans are going to beat this. the important part of the book is a meeting that wednesday after selena dies at the white house where they brought in some people with experience doing the judicial nomination including ron and also the guy in tallahassee who was in charge of the recount, really experienced person so they have a meeting and he says okay lets go through the motions we are going to go through these interviews, we've done this twice before successfully. he goes to dennis and says we

know that he isn't going to nominate him for the seat. he had been kept specifically for this situation he go got the republican supporting orrin hatch already said he would vote for them and republican support. you need to have the president of out to the rose garden. here we are in the bookstore with literary stuff. he is a huge fan of the harry potter books. his daughter had some reading issues and they read the books to her and then she read back to him.

you will see many references he uses in the speeches and around the white house he became known in a positive way this the way they sort of characterize them to themselves. i've got to keep an eye on the time. here was this guy an outstanding individual. i don't think that anybody would dispute that. they had given so much and so they throw him out there because they don't want to -- the other younger ones they think they could put forth that they are afraid that they would be ruined. this is his last chance to be on the supreme court. he's a model for the democrats, many democrats. he's a model for the supreme court this pushback because he's older and sort of moderate so there are people in the party thinking obama should pick much younger maybe minority, a woman

to exercise the debate. they are not going to get a person for that will help drive the democratic voting in november. the obama administration what happens if they just ran into a stone wall mcconnell, chuck grassley not getting anywhere. used to be bipartisan and became much more conservative and led by the evangelicals. he didn't want to move ahead with this either and they came up with a woman has always crafty, came up with an opponent for grassley named patty judge who then the tag commissioner

statewide was on the 70s. every time her name is mentioned people are going to remember that they are blocking a judge. the money just wasn't there and the reason it was and there was because most democrats assume hillary was going to win either she will get to appoint somebody or they will go with garland. there was a lo was a lot of pree and things on the hill but it ran out of steam. they go to the convention in philadelphia and the republicans had made a thing about the supreme court's.

his name wasn't mentioned at one time, not one time. it was a conscious decision they were playing by the rules. so then there's a meeting at the white house. they come back and valerie jarrett gets in on the interest of the people from the judiciary progressives. how are we going to sell merrick garland. what are you doing for me to get him through and one of the oldest democratic leaders in this area is are we going to do, you just had a convention and didn't mention his name once and now we have to do that? i interview both grassley and orrin hatch for the buck and they didn't think that it was the pick o big of a deal becausy thought they are both going to

lose its a postponement. the they thought they were going to lose the senate for sure and it just didn't happen. mitch mcconnell follows over the national republican senatorial committee and i can tell you that building over there, the reagan headquarters at union station as the night goes on it becomes clearer and clearer that trump might actually wayne. since c-span is here i will not do my terrible impersonation, okay i will do it. [laughter] basically he turned to somebody at some point inside are we

going to make america great again tonight, and they did from his perspective. how it all happened goes back to the 60s may be either in the round they lost the back-to-back nominations in th in there was t of hostility over that and actually mitch mcconnell is a brand-new staffer on the judiciary committee and participate and watches the huge nomination fights and it really affects him and thinks the court preeminent mitch mcconnell said that really got him involved. then you have in the 80s ronald reagan comes in and they were basically patronage jobs and positions that were prominent in the senators would

use to reward buddies back in the state and the states and thf control over this. he does put on the sandra day o'connor and so it just becomes more and more intent. of course clarence thomas got married that weekend here in washington and so they have a special affinity for that day the senate buildings and brevity of their wedding totally remembers the. i focus a lot in the book on the post w. election nomination fights. you have to remember how he got elected by the supreme court in what was considered a super

partisan position and still is. so the democrats on the hill considereconsider him illegitima lot of ways they don't think that he should have an easy time getting his nominations through and they start to put up a fight, but weirdly enough, he switches parties and then gives the democrats temporary control of the senate so everything sort of slows down a little bit. chuck schumer at this time interjects himself in and wants to allow members to openly talk about ideology is moving ahead with the nomination because at this point everybody tries to keep that out of the picture you're only supposed to be talking about the judicial qualifications but obviously it is all about ideology and it's s kind of had an said he wanted to be more open and if republicans don't like that the fights get more and more intense and i have a whole chapter on a prominent

hispanic conservative lawyer who became the first appeals court nominecourtnominee to be defeaty filibuster, a strong drawnout fight and the democrats opposed him and tom daschle, kerry read it if you talk to democrats now, they would say they wish they hadn't done that. they would rather have him on the supreme court now than the sum of the other people that were there so that was probably a mistake and they admitted it and it starts this extremely intense partisan warfare over the nominations so bill frist becomes the majority leader and we remember what happened to trent lott. so the democrats are challenging that and they are getting so serious a and it seems so extreme a group of senators got

together with susan collins and ben nelson who's a democratic leader in my book and they get together and finally cut a deal to let some of the charges through and take the pressure off, but it's a defeat to the bill anbillbill and for us to ls the senate and it took a lot of the power away. the agreement really didn't last so they make a deal and things calm down for a while but this is one of my favorite parts of the book. everybody is all stirred up some of the big moments in the senate and everybody's giving these speeches and john warner with a big part of the gang of 149 sure many people here know john warner but a central casting

senator i'm going to read a little bit of this story outside of the senate chamber held forth on the senate the rights of the majority and constitution and the need to preserve i happened to be there along with paul kane quite a speech. we all laughed and said maybe

that could be a chapter. his eyes lit up at the memory as the elevator doors closed would be more than a chapter. great story. very good senator. in 2013 harry reid is very frustrated that the republicans are holding up the obama nominees to defeat the dc circuit court. we make a lot of decisions that affect us directly because of the government policies if he decides to change the rules to get b's obam these obama nomined he does. this element in 2013 he finally

designates the option of gravity has been talking about for years. he gets a bunch of judges through but they didn't do one thing they probably should have done at this point, eliminate the process called blue slip allows them to block a lot of judges. so republicans are furious over what happens and the first chance they got, they got their revenge. mitch mcconnell changes the rules twice since then, one to eliminate the filibuster against the nominees to get in and then to limit the post-cloture time that the senate turned only two hours and it' it allowed them to speed up they are pushing through federal judges, they've got more than 125 through and they are goin were going to go y vacancy they can just encase a

democrat werin case ademocrat we house and the results are showing in the last few days there was a big argument this week in louisiana the affordable care act. the trump nominated and confirmed the charge was extremely hostile and then i think the ruling came out today against the unlawful humans case the district of columbia brought against the trump administration so these things are real and will have an effect for a long time. i can talk more about the implications of this in the future, but i've been telling people i said you know, in 20 or 30 years you will see a decision come down and say how did that come down the.

i hate to be pessimistic. things are very bad on capitol hill. [laughter] in terms of how this is all going to play out. super hostility. if you are in one party to vote against the nominees of the president's party see this with the democratic presidential candidates they oppose every nominee and if it gets turned around to say there's a democratic president and republicaarepublican senate, thd actually come of i, that is an y scenario so how do you get any nominees through if they are going to say he opposed the nominees for trump we are going to do the same and we will probably give it more because that is what happens i if they l did a little more. not seein seeking a way out of s right now. you will see it and a lot more discussion than the democrats normally talk about in the courts because they realize republicans have been better if

using the court as a voting weapon than the democrats have. they've created a new demand justice trying to hold democrats more accountable. it's going to take a while and be a structural change. everybody except by him right now is arguing for some changes in the court may be expanding and making it more like an appeals court. all of the judges he is putting in are younger and more conservative than the people that they are replacing even the

republican nominated judge. somebody said maybe we need another constitutional convention. going to have some big changes, but it's going to be difficult. i will take questions and happy to talk about this more. [applause] i know it is painful for some of you to have to clap for me. [laughter] when you look at the census issue what good the supreme court do if they say i'm going to do this? >> at some point what are the

prospects on the census question if he doesn't get his way and what would the courts be able to do. i have a bunch in my book on the subject. it is a real dilemma because i say in the book that they see them more as partisan operator spam objective operators which is obviously happening in this country. i said that there could be a moment when people start to say he other branches of the government say we are going to ignore the court. i thought that was down the line. trump gets calls from his conservative friends. you can't give up on this and that'that's what he says we aret giving up, that's fake news so this disturbed people in the

justice department who had announced that they were getting up and trump tried now to remove the team they had been blocked from doing that by the judge. they could do something the court ordered them not to do and then you are in like the definition of the constitutional crisis. that is the definition of a constitutional crisis and so what does the court to? the court doesn't have an army or anything. they rely on their own credibility and authority for the other people in the government in the executive and congressional branches to enact and conform with their opinions. so, what happens when that stops? i've asked what this john for ts do about this.

he is a very political chief justice. trying to make the courts seem less political, he's making himself seem way more political so i don't know how they would respond to this but if they were to do that, i'm going to share it like some people in the administration would never do that. we've said that a lot of the things. with the increased pressure on nancy pelosi to move toward impeachment maybe it won't even have an good we are in tricky territory here all of the norms are out the window. so, what we think is normal and what we think people are going to do kind of you cannot count on that anymore. so i think that it is a huge and big issue we are watching closely at the time, that is for sure. john? >> is there anything president obama has done to play hardball

with mcconnell to get the nominees through? what would he have done with speaker obama? >> it's funny joe biden and the other day said the democrats should have been more aggressi aggressive. he left out the fact he was a vice president and he would also provide republican the republich their main talking point by giving a speech, long speech by the way in 1992 urging clinton that george h. w. bush shouldn't move ahead with the nominee disclosethisclose that it was mo the election. so that is the question.

in the book you will see he was kind of most pessimistic about this because he had been dealing with mcconnell now for six years, seven years and had gotten totally blocked by mcconnell when they have taken the majority back so he wasn't that optimistic about it himself. that's why they didn't want to go with a younger person with one of the future because they y didn't want to see the reputation destroyed. at this point i think that it would have taken millions of people surrounding the capital almost to get mcconnell to move. he just wasn't going to do it. he was very stubborn and disciplined. he's one of the few people in a press conference you just can't budge him. he wasn't going to do it.

in some ways he was protecting himself because conservatives were suspicious of mcconnell over the years. they think that he is somebody that is a little too willing to cut a deal at a certain point said he wanted to do this to show he was willing to go to the ball for them and if something happened than he could say he did. i did all i could. but they never thought that it was going to work out this way. look what happened, the supreme court would have been totally flipped the other way if he would have been on the bench, you could almost bet that the gerrymandering decision but a few weeks ago would have been 5-for the other way. they make interesting points because they say he looks moderate and sounds moderate but he does side with the government. his opinions are usually pro-government. so, he would have been just as

much a threat to them as some liberal judge. the opinions would have kind of gone the other way. i don't know if that is true. he's determinehe is determined n the bureaucracy. that's what he's about and they didn't want anyone like garland. that's what they call this in spite of the project. i told the story earlier some of you may remember his mother got involved in a scandal, have to leave her job, and he was at the same school as kavanagh. i'm sure for the kids in high

school this was a very disoriented thing in the book i even talk about he went to his mother and said how do you equate. so the day the hearing started i was with these guys that were shepherding him through and i said i have a theory about him. what's that? he's still really mad about what happened to his mother and he wants to destroy washington. they said that's our theory, too. [laughter]

they didn't like the process. you might not be happy about the way that it works or the way that the republicans handled it for the outcome but it would also require a republican senate and 67 vote majority to impeach someone. i don't see those numbers in the future. these things linger for years if you say something to the republicans about the way they've handled this they say what about bork. they last forever and i wasn't

herhere today if the actual votn the west coast range which was on just the cutting edge of the debate. that's what's going on in the senate right now which is also not giving anything else. there is no legislation going on. they don't want to have any votes. there's nothing happening. the institution has almost become irrelevant except for the nominations. the blue slip was a super old tradition in the senate which, like the filibuster was used for bad purposes. the filibuster was used by dixiecrat.

it reallisraeli forces the pract lets the dixiecrat if they want to control definitely who was in the federal judiciary that is who is imposing all of these new rules for this goes on and there is some flexibility. joe biden has blue slips from some democratic senators thought republican senators, so it stays in and this allows the republicans to there is a thing where he talks disingenuously about this overtime when he's talking about judges in business obama when does this get 100 judges. why didn't he tell them.

of course he didn't tell them because the republicans blocked them with the slips. i asked mitch mcconnell for a podcast. he said i will tell you my personal opinion is we need to get at the blue slip for the appeals. on the appeals court judges there is no longer a blue slip, they were all democrats in california, particularly on the ninth circuit because such a liberal circuit. there is no break on either party you can get anybody through. and that is just kind of the way that it is. >> in the unlikely event

republicans hold the senate and let's say clarence thomas reads the court for some reason -- >> he was asked this very question that there's more attention focused on mcconnell saying he would consider the judge in 2020 despite saying previously he let the people decide tdecide, so this is a whe separate issue. kind of an interesting answer he says okay there is a democratic senate, republican senate, can any supreme court nominee get through and she says while, you know, if it is early in the first year it would be politically unsustainable to not have the hearing and vote on somebody that would have to have a hearing and a vote. but that doesn't mean that they would be confirmed. and that is his quote so you

would have the idea that there would be the hearing that could easily go to that person down. he talked about how there probably wouldn't be any vacancies right now on the liberal side. i like this phrase he said without basic camp life ending event. [laughter] you mean like if somebody died? [laughter] i don't know any insignificant life ending event. so this is going to go on for a long time, and it's a big problem. people know that there's very little that they can do about it. there's disappointed now that is going to have a gazillion dollars because it is now nancy pelosi on the right so they are going to make him a big target. but he could be running in kentucky on the same ticket with trump and he will when.

he knows how to win. that's what he has been doing because he knows what it takes and he doesn't care what any of us or you think about him. [applause] representing ohio's sixth district. >> that's almost too big to say because i'm in the process of five different