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(vo) ask your healthcare provider if ozempic® is right for you. >> bret: it is a day of history and legacy on capitol hill as you look live. president trump's pick for the supreme court faces scrutiny of the senate judiciary committee. good morning from washington i'm bret baier. >> martha: i'm martha maccallum. a live look inside the historic hearing room in the hart senate office building now as we speak. we're minutes away from the beginning of these confirmation hearings for judge brett kavanaugh. today we'll get opening statements from all of the members of the committee. we'll also hear the opening statement from brett kavanaugh himself. >> bret: we will not hear questioning. that begins tomorrow. the hearings are expected to last the next few days. if kavanaugh is confirmed his impact on the u.s. supreme court could be felt for decades. >> martha: let's bring in our

great panel to have watch this unfold today. brit hume, co-host of the five dana perino and "fox news sunday" anchor chris wallace. brit, what are you watching today? >> i remember well 31 years ago when robert bork well qualified judge from this circuit court of appeals from which judge kavanaugh comes was up for confirmation and widely expected he would be confirmed. a lot of democrats were against him and held the majority in the senate. we were well into the hearings when joe biden, who was then the chairman of the committee told me in the hallway outside it was clear that bork would be confirmed. he wasn't because issues arose during the confirmation hearings and bork didn't handle them legally fine but politically not so much he was defeated. mostly they're routine.

things can happen. so we hear it's a foregone conclusion. i heard judge napolitano just say that. maybe it is. but make no mistake about it things can arise in these hearings. the democrats will do everything they can to blow this nomination up if they can. >> bret: this is political theater times 20. you have a lot of people on this senate judiciary committee who may run for president in 2020 so they are going to be making their bones about why he should not be on the supreme court today. >> martha: most notably would be cory booker, the senator from new jersey. -- they have presidential ambitions. 11 republicans and 10 democrats on this panel. brett kavanaugh's judicial philosophy is not in doubt. he is on the d.c. circuit court for 13 years and heard over 2200 matters.

his democrat and republican colleagues have agreed with them 90% of the time on the court. the bigger question you might want to hear about judicial philosophy, the approach. how would you think about this or that case may come up. but i have a feeling especially when you get to some of the democrats they'll try to make this about president trump. that's the way they can ensure they will get on air later on. >> the assumption is he will get through. he could get bor k'd that became a verb after those hearings. chris, when you look at this process and the potential that there could be a glitch, what are you watching? >> well, i want to just say first of all and brit knows this, of course, there was one big difference back in the bork hearing in the late 80s. at that time you still had the filibuster and you still needed 60 votes to get a supreme court nominee confirmed. and starting in 2013 when the

democrats changed the rules and for all judicial nominees except for the supreme court they imposed the nuclear option. all you needed was a bare majority. now mitch mcconnell last year imposed that for the supreme court as well. they only need 50 votes plus the tiebreaking vote of the vice president. if they just hold serve. if they just hold the republicans and it looks at this point like they will and remember, john mccain's empty seat will be replaced well before the final confirmation vote by another republican appointed by governor ducey in arizona. if they hold serve they don't need a single democratic vote. i think we need to talk about the stakes. i have said from the moment that anthony kennedy stepped down this is the most consequential event of the trump presidency. if he is able to get brett kavanaugh in there for the

quintessential swing vote anthony kennedy, it will change the balance of the court -- we talk about the late 80s when kennedy came in, for 30 years. and whether it's on abortion or affirmative action or on the administrative state. that's just in the as, you could see a dramatic change in what the court does and what it says and how it rules about this country for the next 30 years. and the swing vote then will no longer be anthony kennedy, who was a true swing vote, it will be john roberts the chief justice who is far to the right and much more reliably conservative than anthony kennedy was. >> bret: the practice here has been substantial here. we're told brett kavanaugh had a lot of sparring matches. rob portman was his practice mate and one of the introducers today. condoleezza rice, rob portman and lisa blat a liberal feminist who wrote an op-ed

saying i'm a liberal feminist and why i support brett kavanaugh. >> one thing different in addition to what chris pointed out between now and 1987. conservatives and republicans have learned a lot from the bork lesson how to handle the hearings and the whole process. what happened to bork was, he didn't believe and legally there was such an thing as an all size fits all right to privacy in the constitution. and he explained that. he was then successfully tarred with the idea he was against privacy. of course you can't be against privacy and be popular. it's a political process. they're much better at this than they used to do. bork didn't want to do murder boards who others have done where they endure every nasty and probing question. we can expect a well-rehearsed, careful nominee here who is smart as a whip to begin with and he is likely to get through

this. but not definite. >> martha: one of the things closely scrutinized is his time in the bush administration. his work as a staff secretary and white house counsel. and there is about 100,000 documents that were not released, the trump administration basically approved that they would not be signed off on. your thoughts about his work and his time that he spent there. >> interesting. i was deputy press secretary when sandra day o'connor announced her resignation, her retirement. it took the bush administration by surprise. because the conservatives had planned for decades to not get in a situation like bork before there was a list. president bush was able to move forward, justice roberts was that person. i was taking all the incoming phone calls. i'm not a lawyer. i needed somebody to help me understand the law. who did i go to? brett kavanaugh. i got that nomination through

the process and why i think you'll see him do well today. he knows about that. his time in the white house counsel's office is the one that president trump has decided to assert privilege. keep in mind he is following the precedent as set by president obama when he put forward an executive order all about documents in an administration and how they should be handled. i know democrats might be frustrated but president trump is following the precedent set by president obama. >> bret: you had dianne feinstein and other senators on the steps of the supreme court saying one, they had 42,000 documents released last night that they aren't able to process in the time. and two, to say that there is executive privilege on this 100,000 plus other documents. that side. but then the other side is that they have more documents on this nominee than any other supreme court nominee ever. >> more than 400,000. in addition they're talking

about the fact we don't have documents when he worked in the white house counsel's office and don't have documents when he worked at staff secretary for george w. bush. they have 309 opinions he has written as a judge on the circuit court of appeals here in d.c. you know, we're talking about the fact that republicans have gotten better at this. i think the democrats really have not done a very good job in figuring out how to oppose this guy. the initial thought was they would go after him on issues like abortion and that if he gets on the court that perhaps either abortion roe versus wade and a woman's ability to get an abortion will be imposed. then there was talk about healthcare and the continuing fight against obamacare. they have gotten into process. first they said well it's in the middle of an election year. you didn't do merrick garland in an election year and donald trump is under investigation.

steven breyer was appointed here and when he was under investigation for whitewater. then they made a big deal about the papers. as you say, i just don't know that's the kind of thing that people will go to the ramparts on there weren't enough papers released. he has been a judge for over a decade and 300 rulings. people have a pretty good idea where this guy stands. they just haven't been able to gain traction in making the case against him. >> martha: let's go to shannon bream standing by on capitol hill. one of the areas that perhaps democrats feel they could find some traction in these documents that they didn't get is where judge kavanaugh stands on the issue of whether or not a sitting president can be indicted or prosecuted. talk to us a little bit about that. >> many of the senators who have met with him. that has been a key critical question they've had for him. he wrote an article back in 2009, a law review article where he talked about this. he was part of the ken starr

independent counsel team that went after president clinton and part of drafting the memo, the report to congress that outlined the potential grounds for impeaching president clinton. he wrote this law review article saying it is intensely destructive to have a current sitting president to having to undergo civil or criminal investigations or trials. what he said is i'm not saying these people should get off the hook by no means but maybe not while they're in office. the minute they leave office the charges could kick back in. if you're worried about this president's ability to function there is what congress has at its fingertips, impeachment. a lot has been mischaracterized. president trump picked him because he doesn't think that sitting presidents should be subjected to civil or criminal investigations according to the democrats. there is more nuance to that article. the charges could be waiting in the wings but congress has the most powerful weapon of all. if you think a president is so compromised to be unable to

function as the commander-in-chief or you have to impeach him or pass other statues to address the issue. a president can get in trouble but congress not the courts that would have to carry out a remedy while they're sitting in the white house. >> bret: she has a front row seat. the senators are coming in as we look live. we'll take a quick commercial break. our special coverage of the brett kavanaugh confirmation hearings continue after this. and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget... that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you touch shows how we really feel. but does psoriasis ever get in the way? embrace the chance of 100% clear skin with taltz. up to 90% of those with moderate to severe psoriasis had a significant improvement of their psoriasis plaques. most people were still clearer after one year.

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>> martha: we are back with our live coverage of the senate judiciary committee hearings of brett kavanaugh. supreme court justice nominee. everybody is filing into the room. we expect to get started minutes away. let's go back to our panel with discussion about what we expect to hear today. brit, the politics of this, if democrats feel they don't have a shot at derailing this nomination, it's an opportunity for them to sort of put on display all of the reasons that

they believe people across america should not want dem -- republicans to be in stronger power in the mid-terms. >> that's what they're left with. the opportunity they're left with. as has been pointed out you have a couple of likely presidential candidates and they'll want their turn at-bat. there is also this, martha, i think. constituency in the democrat party that is activist and adamantly opposed to this nominee and this president, and resisting him has been what they do. and what they want the politicians they support to do. so whether you can beat the guy or not you want to signal in your statements and questioning that you, too, are resisting this president and fighting this nominee to the best of your ability. so there will be a lot of that kind of posturing. and this is, after all, despite the fact that judge kavanaugh is here and his world is a world of legal issues and legal thinking, this is a political

process. this is not a legal process. and that's what tripped bork up. he answered questions in legal term that were being framed in political terms and he needed to do more on the political side and he would have had a better chance. >> bret: senator blumenthal said sparks will fly in this hearing. you know, they hope sparks will fly because really to chris's point democrats haven't galvanized the opposition to brett kavanaugh. >> martha: it has been nine weeks and haven't been able to find a coherent line of argument against the nominee. aba gave brett kavanaugh the highest rating of well qualified. the other thing i think on the politics of this to carry on what brit was saying, about a week ago senator schumer -- they didn't put up that much of a fight when mitch mcconnell was able to confirm almost 30

district court judges. those are also lifetime appointments. that was a really big deal and i see that kavanaugh is in the room now. >> martha: you see him with his daughters and wife. there is chuck grassley the chairman of the senate judiciary committee. a big day. >> bret: 53-year-old father of two, catholic, long-time on the court and obviously as we said a lot of hearings to review but how he performs today, chris, and this opening statement, how he really performs in questioning will determine his fate. >> and the white house has been very smart. gorsuch was the first nominee and he was replacing another conservative scalia and felt they could get away with a more conservative justice. this fellow for all the talk about you hear out of the mainstream. he is a blue ribbon conservative mainstream judge. as somebody said jeb bush would

have appointed him. some people would be horrified by that on the right but this is as good as it gets on the republican side for a conservative justice. >> which is another way of saying if you are looking for a conservative justice that you can get through, he was the right choice because he is confirmable. the reason for that is you scour as the left no doubt has all 309 of his opinions and found that while they're judicially conservative, he doesn't come across as a flame throwing activist from the right. it's not where he is. and his reasoning is careful and close and so he is respected left and right at least in judicial terms. >> bret: we're getting ready to start here and want to give you full coverage. listen in to this hearing. the senate judiciary committee chaired by chuck grassley from iowa. dianne feinstein from california and we'll get underway. we'll be with you during the

breaks and as they take a break, you'll see us here. the senate judicialary committee and chairman chuck grassley. >> good morning. i welcome everyone to this confirmation hearing on the nomination of brett kavanaugh to serve as associate justice. >> mr. chairman i would like to be recognized for a question

before we proceed. mr. chairman. i would like to be recognized to ask a question before we proceed. the committee received just last night less than 15 hours ago -- >> regular order. >> 42,000 pages that we have not had an opportunity to review, read or analyze. >> you are out of order. i'll proceed. >> we cannot possibly move forward, mr. chairman, for this hearing. we have not been given an opportunity. >> to his wife ashley, their two daughters, and extended family and friends. >> mr. chairman, we received 42,000 documents that we haven't been able -- >> everyone else joining us today. >> we believe this hearing should be postponed. >> i know this is an exciting day for all of you here and you are rightly proud. >> if we cannot be recognized i move to adjourn. mr. chairman, i move to adjourn. >> directly from judge kavanaugh. [cheering and applause]

>> mr. chairman, i move to adjourn. >> and -- >> we have been denied real access to the documents we need to advise. >> mr. chairman, regular order is called for. >> which turns this hearing into a charade and mockery of our norms. mr. chairman i move to adjourn this hearing. >> in is a mockery. this is a travesty of justice. [yelling by demonstrator] >> we are not in executive

session. >> mr. chairman i asked for a roll call vote on my motion to adjourn. >> mr. chairman, i move to adjourn and ask for a roll call vote. >> we are not in executive session. we will continue as planned. >> mr. chairman, may i be recognized, myself or one of my colleagues. >> are you out of order. >> i appeal to be recognized on your sense of decency and integrity. even the documents you have requested, even the ones you have requested the committee has not received and should be transparent. this committee is a violation of even the values i've heard

you talk about time and time again. the ideals we should have. what is the rush? what are we trying to hide by not having the documents out front? what is with the rush? what are we hiding by not laeting those documents come out. this committee is a violation that we as a value that's strifsh en for, transparency. we're rushing through this process in a way that's unnecessary and i appeal for the motion to at least be voted on. at least let's have a vote. when we wrote you a letter august 24 asking to have a meeting on this issue you denied us the right to meet. here we are having a meeting. let's at least debate this issue and call this for a vote. i appeal to your sense of fairness, decency and commitment you've made to transparency. this violates what you have said and called for, sir. you have called for documents. you yourself limited documents. we thought there must be more. we have not received the documents that you have even

called for. sir, based upon your own principles and values, i call for at least to have us a debate or vote on these issues and not for us to rush through this process. [cheering and applause] >> mr. chairman, i've heard calls for -- >> i would like to respond to senator booker. senator booker, i think that i respect very much a lot of things you do but you spoke about my decency and integrity. and i think you are taking advantage of my decency and integrity. so -- [yelling by demonstrators]

>> it is regular order for us to receive all the documents -- to receive all the documents that this committee is entitled to? mr. chairman, it is also -- mr. chairman, it is not also regular order for the majority to require the minority to pre-clear our questions, our documents and the videos we would like to use at this hearing. that's unprecedented and not regular order. since when do we have to submit the questions and the process that we wish to follow to question this nominee? i would like your clarification why you are requesting.

>> senator, i ask that you stop so we can conduct this hearing the way we have planned it. maybe it isn't going exactly the way the minority would like to have it go. but we have said for a long period of time that we were going to proceed on this very day and i think we ought to give the american people the opportunity to hear whether judge kavanaugh should be on the supreme court or not. and you have heard my side of the aisle call for regular order and i think we ought to proceed in regular order. there will be plenty of opportunities to respond to the questions that the minority has legitimately raising. and we will proceed accordingly. >> mr. chairman, under regular order may i ask a point of order, which is that we are now

presented with a situation in which somebody has decided that there are 100,000 documents protected by executive privilege. yet there has not been an assertion of executive privilege before the committee. how are we to determine whether executive privilege has been properly asserted if this hearing goes by without the committee ever considering that question? why is it not in regular order for us to determine before the hearing at which the documents would be necessary whether or not the assertion of privilege that prevents us from getting those documents is legitimate or indeed is even an actual assertion of executive privilege? i do not understand why that is not a legitimate point of order at this point because at the end of this hearing it is too late to consider it. >> mr. chairman, if i might add to this, on the integrity of the documents, we've received. there really is no integrity.

they have alterations, they have auditing, attachments are missing, emails are cut off halfway through a chain. recipient's names are missing. many are of interest to this committee but it is cut off. we -- the national archives hasn't had a chance to get us all that we want even though you said on your website the national archives would act as a check against any political interference. but i checked -- there is no check, i think we ought to at least have a national archive finish it and to have for the first time certainly in my 44 years here to have somebody say there is a claim of executive privilege when the president hasn't made such a claim just puts everything under doubt. what are we trying to hide?

why are we rushing? >> i can answer all the questions that have been raised but i think if i answer those questions it is going to fit into the effort of the minority to continue to obstruct and i don't think that that's fair to our judge, it is not fair to our constitutional process, but let me respond to those now and then maybe we can proceed. my colleagues on the other side are accusing the administration of using executive privilege to hide documents from the committee. i want to say why they're wrong. unlike president obama's assertion of executive privilege during fast and furious as one example, this assertion is not legitimate. judge kavanaugh was a senior lawyer in the white house.

he advised the president on judicial nominations, provided legal advice on separation of powers issues, and handled litigation matters. as the supreme court has put it, quote, unless the president can give his advisors some assurance of confidentiality, a president could not expect to receive the full submissions of facts and opinions upon which the effective discharge of his duties depends, end of quote. the issues judge kavanaugh worked on are exactly the sort of issues that require according to the supreme court, some assurance of confidentiality. we in the senate and everyone else in america expect exactly the same sort of confidentiality. most senators would not agree to turn over their staff's

communication to anyone. for example, we didn't ask that judge kagan's records for her service with then senator biden be turned over during her nomination. and because of attorney/client privilege, everybody has a right to keep communications from their lawyers out of government hands. we therefore didn't ask for justice ginsberg's documents from her time with the aclu. we didn't ask for judge sotomayor's confidential documents from her time in private practice. it can't be that the senate and the aclu are entitled to more protection than the president of the united states. and then i will speak to the fact about 42,000 pages. last night we received additional documents for the committee's review. these were documents we requested before the hearing and we received them before the hearing just as we requested.

the majority staff began reviewing the documents as soon as they' arrived and completed its review. there is no reason -- that's no reason to delay the hearing. we have received and read every page of judge kavanaugh's extensive public record including 12 years of his judicial service on the most important federal circuit court in the country, where he authored 307 opinions and joined hundreds more amounting to more than 10,000 pages of judicial writing. we also received and read more than 17,000 pages of his speeches, articles, teaching materials, other documents that judge kavanaugh submitted with his questionnaire. the most robust questionnaire this committee has ever issued. and of course we received and read more than 483,000 pages of

documents from judge kavanaugh's extensive executive branch service. this is more pages than the last five supreme court nominees combined. in short, this committee has more materials for judge kavanaugh's nomination than we have had on any supreme court nominee in history. senators have had more than enough time and materials to adequately assess judge kavanaugh's qualifications so that's why i proceed. i know that this is an exciting day for all of you in the family and all the people that are close to judge kavanaugh. and you are rightly proud of the judge, the american people get to hear directly from judge kavanaugh later this afternoon after this confirmation hearing and process is finished i expect judge kavanaugh will become the next associate justice of the supreme court. welcome again, judge. before i begin, i would want to

give you, judge, an opportunity to introduce your family. >> thank you, mr. chairman and senator feinstein. and members of the committee. i'm honored to be here today with my family. my wife, ashley, proud west textian, graduate of abilene cooper high school. the town manager of our local community where we live. our daughters margaret and liza. thank the committee for arranging a day off from school today. my mom and dad, martha and ed kavanaugh. my aunt and uncle, nancy and mark murphy. and my first cousins rosie and elizabeth murphy. i'm very honored to be here, honored to have my family here. i'm here because of them. thank you, mr. chairman. >> we are delighted to have

your family here. before i make my opening remarks i want to set out the ground rules for the hearing. i want everyone to watch the hearing without obstruction. if people stand up and block the view of those behind them or speak out of turn it is not fair or considerate to others, so officers will immediately remove those individuals. and i thank the officers for doing the work that they have to do. we'll have 10-minute rounds of opening statements with each member. the ranking member and i may go a little over 10 minutes but i'm going to ask everyone else to limit your remarks to those 10 minutes. i hope everyone will respect that. we plan on taking a 15-minute break after senator cruz's opening statements. after all the opening statements are complete we'll take another 15-minute break to turn to our introducers who will formally present the judge. after that i'll administer the

oath to the judge and we'll close that portion of today's hearing with his testimony. tomorrow morning -- >> mr. chairman. when will we review senator blumenthal's motion to adjourn? >> i renew that motion. i think we're entitled to a vote on it. the response is that mr. chairman you've given with all due respect really fly in the face of the norms of this committee. our traditions and rules. >> mr. chairman if i might add an additional point i agree with my colleague. it is striking given your long history of encouraging the executive branch to treat minority requests that you discouraged the national archives from responding to ranking member feinstein's request that she tried to craft with you to be identical to the request for records from just consist kagan. we should not be proceeding until we have the full documents that allow us to review the judge's records. >> mr. chairman last friday we

learned 102,000 pages of document from judge kavanaugh's work in the white house counsel's office are being withheld from the committee and public based on a claim of executive privilege. that's never been invoked to block the release of presidential records to the senate during a supreme court nomination. this includes when justice kagan was nominated to the supreme court as well as justice roberts. yesterday my colleagues and i sent a letter to the white house counsel asking that the president withdraw his claim of privilege over these documents so they can be made available to this committee and to the american people. we have not yet received a response to that letter. so we should not be proceeding until we have a response and these documents have been available. it is 102,000 documents. >> my motion to adjourn would raise this issue of executive privilege and whether it has been properly asserted for reasons outlined well by my

colleague. there is no valid claim here of executive privilege. even if there were one, it has not been properly asserted. the question is what is the administration afraid of showing the american people? what is it trying to hide? >> mr. chairman using your own words in the statement you read i quote, we've had more than enough time to review the documents. sir, we just got a document dump last night of over 40,000 pages. not one senator here has had time to read through those 40,000 pages. so we're continuing to rush through this process, a process that deserves to be scrutinized. i support senator blumenthal's motion to adjourn and hope we can at least have a vote on that motion. >> i think you would be hard pressed to find a court in the country that would not give a party litigant a continuance when the party on the other side did a 42,000 page document dump after close of business

the night before trial. >> mr. chairman, we waited for more than a year with a vacancy on the supreme court under the direction of your leader in the united states senate and the republic survived. i think the treatment was shabby of merrick garland and president obama's nominee. the fact that we cannot take a few days or weeks to have a complete review of judge kavanaugh's record is unfair to the american people and inconsistent with our responsibility under article 2 section 2 of the constitution to advise and consent on supreme court nominees. >> senator cornyn, you want to speak? >> thank you. i'll be brief. i would just say that senator whitehouse suggested we handle this hearing like a court of law. i would suggest if this were a court of law that virtually every side -- every member on

the dais would be held in contempt of court because this whole process is supposed to be a civil one where people get to ask questions and we get to get answers. that's the basis upon which we are to exercise our constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent. so i would just suggest we get on with the hearing. >> if my colleague -- >> if i could just respond. if we could just respond to that, sir. >> you can respond but just a minute. if people wonder why the chair is so patient during this whole process, i have found that it takes longer to argue why you shouldn't do anything than let people argue why they want it. these things are going to be said throughout this hearing. we're going to be in session tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday, until we get done this week. so however long people want to

take we're going to not necessarily accommodate all obstruction, but if people got something to say this chairman will let them say it. but it gets pretty boring to hear the same thing all the time. senator booker, make it quick, please. >> i appreciate the deference, mr. chairman. the question was why would we want to delay this? this is not an attempt to delay. this is an attempt to be fully equipped to do our constitutional duty which everybody, republicans and democrats on this committee take seriously. it is very hard to perform our role to advise and consent when we do not have a thorough vetting of the background of the candidate. in areas which the candidate himself has referred to as the most formative part of his legal career. where he himself has talked about how important this period

of his life is we're denied the full vetting. sir, this is not something that democrats are asking for. i remind you that you yourself asked for a limited set of documents for when he was in the white house counsel's office. you yourself set that standard and even on that limited standard, sir, we have not received the documents. and then even the documents we've received 7% of them, almost half of those have been labeled committee confidential and cannot be put before the american people which further undermines and inhibits our ability to ask questions to thoroughly vet this candidate and advise the president of the united states. on the basic ideals of fairness, the traditions of this body we should have a thorough understanding of the nominee that's put before us so that we can vet them to go into this hearing without those documents is an undermining of the constitutional role to which we have all sworn an oath

to uphold. >> mr. chairman, i have great respect for my colleague from texas. >> senator feinstein has asked for the floor. i would like to respond to senator booker. senator booker, using a standard set by two members of your political party in the caucus, and i'm going to phrase because i don't have the exact quotes in front of me but recently senator schumer said from the floor the best judge of whether or not somebody should be on the supreme court is decisions that they've made at lower courts. senator leahy said something similar to that when senator sotomayor was before us, that we know how many -- we know

what you have done in a lower court, that's the best basis for knowing whether or not you ought to be on the supreme court. so we have 307 cases that this nominee has written decisions on as a basis for that. and we've had 488,000 other pages and maybe the senators haven't read them but their staff is fully informed because last night before 11:00 on the 42,000 pages that have come to our attention, the staff on the republican side has gone through them. >> bret: why did you ask for the without counsel documents, why would you ask for them? >> that's a rate of 7,000 pages per hour. that's super human. >> they're amazing. they're amazing. >> mr. chairman, if i may, i've

been through nine supreme court hearings. >> is this your opening statement? >> why don't you make your opening statement. >> shall i? >> in response to my colleague from texas, he has directly challenged. >> i said you are out of order. >> mr. chairman, i ask in the process of regular order an opportunity to respond to what i believe was a personal attack. >> i would like to have you give senator feinstein the courtesy of listening to her opening statement. >> i was just going to say some things and you heard that this is my ninth hearing, and i think we've got to look at this -- these are very unique circumstances. not only is the country deeply divided politically, we also find ourselves with a president who faces his own serious problems. over a dozen cabinet members

and senior aides to president trump have resigned, been fired, or failed their confirmations under clouds of corruption, scandal, and suspicion. the president's personal lawyer, campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, and several campaign advisors have been entangled by indictments, guilty pleas and criminal convictions. so it's this back drop that this nominee comes into. when what we're looking at is, is he within the mainstream of american legal opinion and will he do the right thing by the constitution? we are also experiencing the vetting process that has cast aside tradition in favor of speed. when justice scalia died,

republicans refused to even meet, even a meeting in their office with president obama's nominee and held the seat open for one year. now with a republican in the white house, they've changed their position. the majority rushed into this hearing and is refusing to even look at the nominee's full record. in fact, 93% of the records from kavanaugh's tenure in the white house as counsel and staff secretary have not been provided to the senate. and 96% have not been given to the public. we do know what the white house thinks of this nominee. don mcgahn, the white house counsel, spoke to the federalist society and made clear brett kavanaugh is exactly the kind of nominee the president wanted. in a speech, mr. mcgahn discussed president's trumps

two lists of potential supreme court nominees, one he said was filled with mainstream candidates. the other list included candidates that are too hot for prime time. the kind that really would be really hot in the senate. probably people who have written a lot. we really get a sense of their views. the kind of people that make people nervous. that's a quote. now, what i'm saying, this is the back drop into which we come into this situation. so yes, there is frustration on this side. we know what happened with the prior nominee, the last one president obama presented to us. he never even got a meeting. he never got a hearing. he never got a vote. and now the rush to judgment and the inability to really have a civil and positive

process ends up being the result. i really regret this, but i think you have to understand the frustration on this side of the aisle. everyone on this side of the aisle wants to do a good job. they want time to be able to consider what the findings are and there are tens of thousands of pages of emails and other items which could constitute findings on a whole host of major subjects that this nominee may be faced with. and they're serious. the torture issues, all of the enron issues that he has been through, all of the kinds of things that we want to ask questions about. so understand where we're coming from. it is not to create a disruption, it is not to make this a very bad process, it is to say majority, give us the time to do our work so that we

can have a positive and comprehensive hearing on the man who may well be the deciding vote for many of america's futures. >> mr. chairman i renew my motion to adjourn. ask for a second. >> second the motion. >> mr. chairman, i ask for a vote. i ask that we reconvene in executive session and have a vote. >> we're having a hearing. it's out of order. we're not in executive session. that would be the proper forum for entertaining motions. >> i ask we reconvene in executive session. >> we won't vote on senator blumenthal's suggestion or follow your suggestion to go into executive session. motions will not be proper at this time. >> mr. chairman, it's a pending motion before the committee.

[shouting from the room] >> if there is no vote on this motion, which has been properly seconded and which could be given a vote in executive session, this process will be tainted and stained forever. i'm asking as a member of this committee it is my right to do so, that we vote on my motion to adjourn and senator harris's motion to postpone and that we do it in executive session which can be easily and quickly convened right now. >> the motion is out of order. >> sir, i make a very clear and simple motion to move into executive session so senator blumenthal's motion may be considered. >> the motion is out of order. >> they're not out of order, mr. chairman. they're properly before this committee. simply saying so with all due respect. i have great respect for the chairman, doesn't make them so. doesn't make them out of order just because the chairman rules they're out of order. we have a number of excellent

lawyers in this room and i ask that this body now do what its responsibility is, to have an executive session so we can vote on a motion to adjourn and then we can deliberately and thoughtfully consider the documents that have been presented and also review the committee documents that have been marked confidential without any reason or rationale. >> the motion is denied. >> sir, how long would that take? 10 minutes? i don't understand what the rush is that we can't even let senators vote on what is a very important motion, germane to our constitutional duties before this body, before we proceed. i don't understand. it won't take that much time. what's the rush? what are we afraid of? to hold a vote on the motions before us.

>> mr. chairman. >> senator kennedy. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i have a question about the process. i understand my colleagues want and i understand they feel strongly about this. but what are going to be the ground rules today? are we going to be allowed to interrupt each other? interrupt a witness? are we -- should we seek recognition from the chair? i just want to understand the ground rules. >> proper respect and decorum, plus how we normally have done business in a hearing like this. we wouldn't be having all these motions. you are new to the senate so this is something i've never gone through before in 15 supreme court nominations that i have been since i've been on here and every member -- i was interrupted before i got a chance to say what the agenda for today, but every member is

going to get 10 minutes to make their remarks and then we will go to the introducers of judge kavanaugh. there will be three of those. they will take the usual time of introducers and then we will have the swearing in of judge kavanaugh. and then we will have his opening remarks and then we will adjourn for today. we'll reconvene at 9:30 on wednesday and thursday. each member will have 30 minutes to ask questions or make all these points they're making right now for the first round. then there will be a second round of 20 minutes each. so every member is going to get 50 minutes to ask all the questions or make all the statements that they want to make in regard to anything about this candidate or anything about how this meeting is being conducted.

and then we will go late into wednesday night or thursday night until we get done with the questioning of judge kavanaugh. and then on thursday we're going to have three panels of six each evenly divided for people that think judge kavanaugh should be on the supreme court and people that think he should not be on the supreme court. and we hopefully get that done friday. but if we have to go saturday and sunday we'll go saturday and sunday until we get it all done. >> mr. chairman, how can we possibly -- >> does that answer your question, senator kennedy? >> yes, mr. chairman, i appreciate it. if i want to say something, do i need to be recognized by the chair? >> that would be the way that it's handled. i've tried to explain to you, i want to be patient because sometimes if you aren't patient and you argue why something should be done it takes longer than it does just to listen to people. but i don't think we should have to listen to the same

thing three or four times. >> patience is good, mr. chairman. but i just want to understand the rules. >> you would be recognized. you can understand that i have been patient and listened to people not be recognized and speak anyway because i would like to have this be a peaceful session. >> before i try your patience, i'm done. >> i have a question about ground rules. the question is, before we can proceed i would like to know whether the majority is still requiring of all of the democratic members of this committee to pre-clear the questions, documents and videos that we would like to use at this hearing. >> if the -- i was hoping that on the subject that you just brought up that we would have some clarification of what you want to approach that. and i'm not prepared to answer that question because i don't what the answer has been and i

don't want you to give me what you think the answer has been of discussion between our staff on that subject. >> i don't think it's ever been the case in a hearing like this that the members of this committee have to pre-clear what we propose to query the nominee about. that is totally unprecedented. >> mr. chairman, if we don't even know what the rules are, how can we proceed with the hearing? >> i want to respond to senator hir on owe. the reason why we're having this discussion at least in my time on this committee and for 15 nominations, we've never had a request for a video. so it seems to me to be courteous to all the members of the committee it would be nice to know the purpose and what it might contain. you don't -- any questions you want to ask you can ask questions. it isn't about what questions you were going to ask, it is about the presentation of something that has never been a part of a supreme court hearing

in the past. >> mr. chairman. >> i think i'll go back and forth. senator tillis. >> i'm confused. i heard earlier this was a reaction to the document releases last night but i'm reviewing a tweet from nbc that said democrats plotted coordinated protest strategy over the holiday weekend all agreed to disrupt and protest the hearing sources tell me. and subsequent dem leader chuck schumer led a phone call and committees are executing now. i want to be clear, none of the members on this committee participated in this phone call or strategy before the documents were released yesterday? are you suggesting that this allegation is false? >> senator durbin. >> mr. chairman, there was a phone conference yesterday. at the time of the phone conference many issues were raised.

one of the issues with were documents considered as confidential. i've been a -- committee confidential documents are limited to extraordinary circumstances. if someone is accused of taking drugs during the course of an investigation, i'm not making a suggestion that's even the case or close to it here. it was done in a confidential setting in fairness to the nominee. the same thing on duis and the like. we used an extremely rare circumstances where we would meet after the committee meeting and sit down and usually related to a handful of pages or document references. instead what we found now is that we're seeing hundreds of thousands of documents characterized as committee confidential unilaterally. it's being done by the chairman. one of the discussions yesterday was the whole question of whether this committee is going to hear a nominee for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land without

access to basic information about his public record. his public record as secretary to the president of the united states, staff secretary. 35 months of public service. we've been told cannot even be considered. the documents of that service cannot be considered. i would say to the senator from north carolina, there was a conversation yesterday about these documents. i had no idea at 11:00 last night 42,000 documents would be put on top of us and asked to take them up today. it added insult to injury. >> mr. chairman i asked to be recognized under rule 4. it states the chairman shall entertain a non-debatable motion to bring a matter before the committee to a vote. if there is objection to bring the matter to a vote without further debate, a role call of the committee shall be taken and debate shall be terminated if the motion to bring the matter to a vote without further debate passes with 11 votes in the affirmative.

one of which must be cast by the minority. i ask for a vote on my motion to adjourn under rule 4, mr. chairman. these are rules that we are obligated to follow. the chairman has no right, with all due respect, to simply override them by fiat. >> we are obligated by that rule in executive session. we are not in executive session. i would respond -- i would -- i would respond to the issues brought up by senator durbin about confidential documents. i was criticized for my decision to receive some documents on committee confidential, but i'm doing exactly what i did during judge gorsuch's confirmation, and

what chairman leahy did during justice kagan's. this is another example of treating regular committee practices as somehow out of the ordinary. presidential records that we receive often contain highly sensitive advice to the president as well as personal privacy information like full names, date of birth, social security numbers and bank account numbers like my predecessor i agreed to have some as committee confidential so democrats and republicans can begin reviewing judge kavanaugh's materials much earlier. i don't know why my democratic colleagues object to receiving documents faster. but not all of these presidential records remain confidential. in fact, nearly 2/3 already became public. these records are posted on the committee's public website and

available to the american people. as a result, we provided unprecedented public access to a record number of presidential records and did it in record time. the most sensitive presidential records remain committee confidential under federal law. just as they were during the nominations of kagan or gorsuch. 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 my staff set up workstations and have been available 24/7 to help senators who are not on committee access confidential materials but not one senator showed up. i guess senators complaining about lack of access to confidential documents weren't really interested in seeing them in the first place but i want to emphasize more documents are widely available than in any prior supreme court nomination. and then to the issue about hiding committee confidential documents, some colleagues -- you've heard it this morning -- accused of hiding documents. they're suggesting that some of the committee confidential documents contain information that would be of great interest to the public. well, just as i did last year during the justice gorsuch confirmation, i put a process

in place that would allow my colleagues to obtain the public release of confidential documents for use during the hearing. all i asked was my colleagues to identify the documents they intended to use and i would work to get the department of justice and former president bush to agree to waive restrictions on the documents. senator feinstein secured the public release of 19 documents last year under this process and senator klobuchar secured the release of four documents this year. if my colleagues truly believe that other committee confidential documents should have been made public they never told me about them and requested the ones they wanted. instead of scaring the american people by suggesting that we're hiding some incriminating documents, they should have made a request that i worked to get the committee confidential designation removed. this year i received no such

request except from senator klobuchar, which was honored and resulted in the disclosure of documents that she wanted to use during this hearing. >> mr. chairman, you stated what i did and inaccurately: >> i said i was paraphrasing it. >> it was one heck of a paraphrase when you speak about doing the same thing as with kagan. i was chairman when kagan was here. we had 99% of her records from the white house were made public 12 days-12 days before the hearing. with judge kavanaugh we have 7% and only 4% are public. you could talk about the numbers of pages. the fact is, 99% for justice

kagan 12 days before the hearing. it was all available. judge kavanaugh 7% and only 4% made public. so if we're going to argue what was precedent i would point out that i've been in the senate for 19 supreme court nominations. what's being done here is unprecedented. and i keep coming back to the same question i asked what are we trying to hide? what are we hiding? what is being hidden? why not have it open like all others? the only other time we heard a president invoke executive privilege was president reagan during the justice william rehnquist hearing and republicans and democrats together went to him and said don't do that.

he said okay, you're right. and he withdrew his request of executive privilege and released the documents. i'm just sorry to see the senate judiciary committee descend this way. i felt privileged to serve here under both republican and democratic leadership for over 40 years. this is not the senate judiciary committee i saw when i came to the u.s. senate. there is -- >> my name was invoked by you, could i please respond. >> after i get done. i want to give the exact quote i was paraphrasing. chairman layy said, quote. we have judge sotomayor's record from the bench. that was a public record before she was designated by the

president. judge sotomayor's mainstream record of judicial restraint and modesty is the best indication of her judicial philosophy. we do not have to imagine what kind of a judge she will be because we see what kind of a judge she has been. so that's why my answer to -- as the gold standard of whether senator kavanaugh ought to be on the supreme court based upon what democrats themselves have said is the best judge of whether you should be on the supreme court. senator klobuchar. >> you mentioned what i said. let me finish on that. on justice sotomayor. i did say we should look at her cases just as we should on judge kavanaugh's. but -- but you neglect to mention -- carefully neglect to mention and erroneously neglect to mention that the republicans

asked for four minutes from her work in a civil rights group in the 1980s, long before she was ever even considered as a judge. you asked for that and we got it for you. >> mr. chairman, you called on me. >> before senator klobuchar speaks we have 488,000 pages of documents. go ahead, senator klobuchar. >> number one, justice so*et -- sotomayor never worked in the white house. number two, while i appreciate you granting my request, mr. chairman, on these campaign finance documents, this is all they were. this is it. this is how many pages. yet we have 148,000 documents that we can't talk about publicly. i will say they are illuminating. it shows the nominee has a

limited view of campaign finance reform in his own words. he says that his views on the first amendment are pure when it comes to this very important issue. we can talk about that more in the future. but i do have a question and that is that yes, i asked for these documents but i've also joined several letters led my senator feinstein asking that all the documents that we have in the committee be made public so that we can ask questions. and then finally on my initial point that i'm so focused on, the 102,000 pages of documents from judge kavanaugh's work in the white house counsel, i would like to know, mr. chairman, if you have another example of a time when executive privilege was invoked to block the release of presidential records to the senate during a supreme court nomination. as far as my research shows it wasn't done for justice kagan or justice roberts and i would like to know if you have another example of that during a supreme court nomination

hearing. >> it was done for justice roberts and it was the solicitor's general. >> when he was a solicitor general but during the time they worked in the white house is my question. >> mr. chairman, i would like to bring to the attention of the chair. >> i believe i have the floor. >> thank you for recognizing me. i haven't been in as many confirmation hearings as some of my colleagues, but this is the first confirmation hearing for a supreme court justice i've seen basically according to mob rule. we have rules in the senate. we have norms for decorum. everybody as you pointed out will get a chance to have their say. you've given everybody a chance to ask questions for up to 50 minutes and given them a chance to make an opening statement. any one of our colleagues can step out here and talk to the press and make whatever comments they want to the press and tell the world how they feel about this.

but the fact is it's hard to take it seriously when every single one of our colleagues in the senate judiciary committee on the democratic side have announced their opposition to this nominee even before today's hearing. so it's hard to take seriously their claim that somehow they can't do their job because they've been denied access to attorney/client or executive privilege documents when they've already made up their mind before the hearing. there is nothing fair about that. we would ask for an opportunity for the american people to be able to listen to this nominee answer the questions that we have. and i think that's how we ought to proceed and i hope we will. >> can i be recognized to respond specifically to that comment? there is precedent here, there are rules that can guide us. we're asking for those rules to be followed. in the past our colleagues on the republican side have asked for a postponement of these committee proceedings on nominations when documents have

been denied on two occasions from senator sessions, then senator sessions, and senator kyle. those requests were granted. we're asking simply that precedent be followed, mr. chairman. far from mob rule, far from contempt of the process we're simply asking for respect here to the normal regular order. >> mr. chairman, i would like to address this committee confidential issue one more time because you have explained your point of view. here is what we know. the chairman grassley, who is my friend and i respect said his reason for unilaterally designating 147,000 pages of committee confidential is because that was the condition that bill bert imposed on the provision of the documents. when judge kavanaugh was meeting with us i asked him who is bill burke.

by what authority can he restrict the information given to the senate judiciary committee and american people? is he a government employee? no one knew this mysterious bill burke who was filtering the documents. since the nominees carries the constitution in his pocket there must be some reference to bill burke in article 2, second 2. advice and consent of the senate. it doesn't include mr. burke. by what authority is this man holding back hundreds of thousands of documents from the american people? who is he? who is paying him? so committee confidential is being determined by a man, a private attorney, and we don't know who he works for, or who he is accountable to. mr. chairman, in the past when we went into committee confidential it was in a discrete, specific area of concern involving a handful of words or accusations that had been made in a document and we were very careful to do it on a bipartisan basis. that has not been the case here where 147,000 pages have been

designated by bill burke as outside the reach of the american people in the senate judiciary committee. a further example of why this whole process has gone astray. your explanation ignores that. >> mr. chairman. >> who wants the floor. >> the new senator. thank you, mr. chairman. mr. chairman, can you tell me again how many documents have been produced? >> 488,000 minus -- i mean other than 28,000 pages that justice kavanaugh had submitted, including his own judicial opinions. >> number two, are we in executive session or not? >> we're having a hearing on the nomination of the nominee for the supreme court. we're not in executive session. >> number three, at some point will we get to hear from the

nominee? >> hopefully it was going to be before 2:30. it will probably be later this afternoon now. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> mr. chairman -- >> can i ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle how long you want to go on with this? because i'm not going to entertain any of the motions you are making. we're not in executive session. and i think we ought to level with the american people. do you want this to go on all day? because i have been patient. i've been accused of having a mob rule session. now, if we have a mob rule session it is because the chairman is not running the committee properly. but since every one of you on that side of the aisle except senator booker, harris and new to the committee said during justice gorsuch's hearing, every one of you prefaced your conference on how fair i was in running that hearing. this is the same chuck grassley that ran the gorsuch hearings. i would like to run this hearing the same way if you'll

give me the courtesy of doing it. how long do you want to go on? >> mr. chairman, i would like to make one more point before we proceed if i might. the accusation that this is a mob rule hearing was made by your colleague from the state of texas. i think you have been conducting this in a respectful, appropriate, deliberate way. my concerns that i want to renew given the exchange you just had with senator leahy who has presided over more supreme court confirmations than any currently serving member i believe was over how the document request was handled for now justice kagan. a request was sent to the national archives. ranking member feinstein tried to work with you to find an identical request if the national archives. i would like to have a settled heart about why you chose to communicate directly to the archives, not to respond to the ranking member's request. members of this committee have raised issues about an

unprecedented committee process by which documents were blocked, by which they were considered classified, and by which we have been blocked from being able to share them with the american people or ask questions based on them. this is unprecedented. that's why, as you put it, this side seeks to raise issues to establish ground rules before we proceed. >> you asked an appropriate question. i have an answer. i don't know whether it will satisfy you or not. those documents are the least useful in understanding his legal views and the most sensitive to the executive branch. and let me emphasize the most sensitive to the executive branch. the staff secretary serves as an in box, out box to the oval office. and you will have opportunities to ask the nominee himself what

he did then, but i'm giving you my judgment about being a person that primarily was responsible for managing the paper that crosses the president's desk. his job and if i'm wrong, he can satisfy you otherwise in your questions you want to ask him, but his job was the make sure the president sees the advice of other advisors, not as staff secretary providing his own advice. one of president clinton's staff secretary, todd stearns, described the job this way. the staff secretary's job is not to influence the president but to insure he gets a balanced diet of viewpoints from all relevant people on the staff. you are certainly not trying to put your thumb on the scale between options. reviewing judge kavanaugh's staff secretary documents would teach us nothing about his legal views.

for that, we have the 307 opinions that he wrote and the hundreds more joined totally more than 10,000 pages of judicial writings. we also have more than 17,000 pages of speeches, articles, teaching materials, and other materials that judge kavanaugh attached to his 120-page written response, which i think was the judiciary's questionnaire was probably the most robust questionnaire ever submitted to a supreme court nominee. we also have more than 480,000 pages of emails and other documents from judge kavanaugh's service as an executive branch lawyer. this is a half million pages of paper, more than the last five confirmed supreme court nominees combined. in addition to not shedding light on kavanaugh's legal views, the staff secretary

documents are very sensitive to the executive branch. let's emphasize that word sensitive. these documents contain highly confidential advice, including national security advice that went directly to the president from his advisors. it would threaten the candor of future advice to presidents if advisors knew their advice would be broadly disclosed. senators have more documents for judge kavanaugh than any nominee in senate history. democratic leaders insist on getting staff documents, i think it was a way of not having this hearing take place at this particular time. so can i proceed, members of the democratic caucus? >> if i may be recognized. >> after you're done can i proceed to my opening statement. >> i'll defer to my colleagues. as a point of information we

sent a letter to you seven days ago regarding the committee confidential nature of the documents and asked that they would not be designated committee confidential. as another point of information it is my understanding there are six to seven million pages of documents regarding this nominee and it is my understanding with all due respect, mr. chairman, that you've only requested 10 to 15% of the total. i appreciate that there are a lot of pages of documents but we have to have this conversation in the context of the total and the fact that we've only been given by your request 10 to 15% of those dock. . my final point is this. this is a hearing about who will sit on the highest court of our land. this is a hearing that is about who will sit in a house that symbolizes our system of justice in this country. and some of the most important principles behind the integrity

of our system of justice is that we have due process and we have transparency. that is why we have public courtrooms. that is why we have requirements in courts of law in our country that there will be transparency. that both parties will be given all relevant information. we can argue then as to the weight of the documents and the significance. but not as to whether or not they're admissible. so i object, i ask that we renew and revisit senator blumenthal's motion to suspend or my motion to postpone this hearing. thank you. >> thank you, appreciate the courtesy of the democrats for me to proceed. >> may i just have one last opportunity with my motion. i appreciate your giving me the floor. i've made a motion that is

properly before this committee. the chairman said earlier that he has never been through a confirmation process like this one. the reason is that no administration in the past has engaged in this kind of concealment. that's the reason very simply. it is not the chairman's doing necessarily. it is this administration that has concealed and hidden documents from us and from the american people. and so i renew my motion that we adjourn so that we can access the documents we need, review them in a deliberate and thoughtful way, much has been done for colleagues in the past when they have requested it, and as is required under rule 4 of our rules. there is no requirement that we be in executive session to follow this rule, mr. chairman.

and i respectfully ask that we follow our rules that we proceed in accordance with those norms and i know the chairman has great respect for open government, whistleblowers, for sunlight as the best disinfect ant. we need some sunlight in this process. thank you, mr. chairman. i again renew my motion to adjourn which has been seconded by senator whitehouse. >> denied because we're not in executive session. i will proceed with my -- >> i would just like to make one correction. there is a misconception as to what white house staff secretaries do. two wrote an op-ed in the "washington post" entitled staff secretaries aren't traffic cops. stop treating kavanaugh like he was one. in fact judge kavanaugh himself has acknowledged the importance

of the time he was white house staff secretary. so why, mr. chairman, you and the others on your side keep saying this is kind of a nothing kind of job, nothing could be further from the truth. this is why we are so adamant about requesting these documents that the judge himself, the nominee himself, has said were among the most formative time of his adult life. thank you. >> of course that's why we have this hearing. judge kavanaugh -- >> we don't have the documents. >> judge kavanaugh will have an opportunity to answer every question about his role in almost anything he has done in his lifetime, i assume. >> mr. chairman, may i be recognized. >> will you be the last one or want to go on all afternoon? >> a lot of people i have a lot of respect for on this committee. some of the new folks especially. i want to answer in the most plain spoken way i can possibly

do. we're expected to evaluate a nominee who has a vast record and if you look and a lot of numbers have been cited. 100,000 year, an entire body of his record, sir, we only have 10% of his record we've been able to evaluate. 90% has been withheld from senators. 90% of his record. we're asking to evaluate a candidate, to have intelligent questions and insights into his record but we only have 10% of the record. we can go on and on about the numbers of documents. 100,000, 10,000. we're about to proceed with a historic hearing. we're about to proceed towards having a hearing on someone having a lifetime appointment on the most important court in the land that will effectuate so many of the areas of american life from civil rights to women's rights to access to healthcare, all of this stuff being decided and we're going into this only having 10% -- access to 10% of the body of

work of this man's career. that seems to me just common sense, 90% is missing right now. common sense says we should have access to thoroughly evaluate this person. we are not asking for anything out of the ordinary. other candidates have come before. people can talk about 100,000 or 10,000. we've gotten far more than just 10%, my colleagues talk about what our duty to the american public is. it's to evaluate a candidate on their body of work. we aren't even getting released that. why? because some political person, not a person who holds public office, not because -- it's unprecedented to this this committee has cedeed it's role to -- 90% is being withheld.

common sense would say that's not fair, right, it undermines our ability to do our job. it is just plain wrong. [yelling from the crowd] >> one of the senates duty is to provide advice and consent on the nomination of supreme court justices. we're here this week to hear from brett kavanaugh, to hear about his exceptional qualifications, his record of dedication to the rule of law, and his demonstrated independence and his appreciation of the importance of the separation of powers. indeed, to protect individual liberty, the framers designed a

government of three co-equal branches strictly separating legislative, executive and judicial powers. the framers intended for the judiciary to be immune from the political pressures the other two face. that is, so that judges would decide cases according to the law and not according to popular opinion. now 230 years after ratification, our legal system is the envy of the world. it provides our people stability, predictability, protection of our rights and equal access to justice. but this is only possible when judges are committed to the rule of law. our legal system's success is

built on judges accepting that their role is limited to deciding cases and controversies. a good judge exercises humility and makes decisions according to specific facts of the case and, of course, according to the law. a good judge never -- a good judge never bases decisions on his preferred policy preferences. a good judge also has courage recognizing that we have an independent judiciary to restrain judges when that government exceeds lawful authority. president andrew jackson said, quote, all the rights secured to the citizens under the constitution are worth nothing

and a mere bubble except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous judiciary, end of quote. confirmation hearings for supreme court nominees are an independent -- are a very important opportunity to discuss the appropriate role of judges. as i see it, and i expect many of my colleagues will agree, the role of the judge is to apply the law as written, even if the legal result is not one the judge personally likes. justice scalia has often been quoted because he was fond of saying if a judge always likes the outcome of the cases he decides, he is probably doing something wrong. i don't want judges who always reach a liberal result or a conservative result. i want a judge who rules the

way the law requires. judges must leave law making to the congress, the elected representatives of the people. judges and justices have lifetime appointments. they can't be voted out of office if they legislate, whereas if congress legislates something that people don't like, then you can vote them out of office. that's why they are to interpret law and not make law. some have a very different view of what a judge's role should be. according to this few, judges should decide cases based upon particular outcomes in order to advance their politics. but the american people don't want their judges to pick sides before they hear a case. they want a judge who rules based upon what the law commands. this is the reason why all supreme court nominees since ginsberg have declined to offer

their personal opinions on the correctness of precedent. seeking assurances from a nominee on how he will vote in certain cases or how he views certain precedent undermines judicial independence and essentially asks for a promise in exchange for a confirmation vote. it's unfair and unethical, indeed what litigant could expect a fair shake if the judge pre-judged a case before the litigant even enters the courtroom. i expect judge kavanaugh, in fact it's my advice to him, to follow the example set by justice ginsburg and all nominees that followed her, that a nominee should offer, quote, no hints, no forecasts, no previews, end of quote, on how they will vote.

justice kagan, when asked about roe versus wade said the following, quote, i do not believe it would be appropriate for me to comment on the merits of roe versus wade other than to say that it is settled law entitled to weight. a application of roe to future cases and even its continued validity are issues likely to come before the court in the future, ends of quote. senators were satisfied with these answers on precedent. so, senators should be satisfied if judge kavanaugh answers similarly. this is my 15th supreme court confirmation hearing since i joined the committee in 1981. 31 years ago, during my fourth supreme court confirmation hearing, liberal outside groups and their senate allies engaged

in unprecedented smear campaign against judge robert bork. as was said in an op-ed over the weekend, quote, the borking of robert bork told special interest groups -- worse, character assassinations proved an effective tactic nearly sinking justice clarence thomas's appointment four years later. but he also said continuing to quote, by confirming judge kavanaugh, the senate can go some way toward atoning for its shameful treatment of justice robert bork 31 years ago, end of quote. judge kavanaugh is one of the most qualified nominees, if not the most qualified nominee, that i've seen. a graduate of yale law school

clerking three federal judges including a man he nominated to replace. he spent all but three years of his career in public service and has served as a judge for 12 years on the d.c. circuit. the most influential federal circuit court. he has one of the most impressive records for a lower court judge in the supreme court. in at least a dozen separate cases, the supreme court adopted positions advanced by judge kavanaugh. the american bar association, whose assessment democratic leaders have called the gold standard of judicial evaluations, rated judge kavanaugh unanimously well qualified. a review of judge kavanaugh's extensive record demonstrates a deep commitment to the rule of law. he has written eloquently that both judges and federal agencies are bound by the law congress enacts. and he has criticized those who

substitute their own judgment about what a statute should say for what the statute actually says. after president nominated judge kavanaugh i said this would be the most surreal and transformative process in history. i say that statement even regarding all the discussion we've had this morning. it has proven to be, from judge kavanaugh's authoring 307 opinions, joined hundreds more, amounting to more than 10,000 pages, if submitted -- he submitted 17,000 pages of speeches, articles, and other materials to the committee, along with this 120-page written response to the questionnaire that the committee set out. these add up to 27,000 pages of judge kavanaugh's record already available to the

american people and we received just shy of a half million pages of emails from his service as an executive branch lawyer which is more than we received for the last five supreme court nominees. every one of these more than 483,000 pages of executive branch records are available to any senator 24/7. i pushed for federal officials to significantly expedite public disclosure process under federal law so that all americans have online access to more than 290,000 pages of these records right now on our committee website. in order -- in short, the american people have unprecedented access and more materials to review judge kavanaugh than ever have had for a supreme court nominee. and to support the review of judge kavanaugh's historic

volume of material, i've worked to ensure that more senators have access to more material than ever. so much of the rest of my statement has been discussed this morning by what the democrats have said and i've answered a lot of it, i will put the last seven pages of my statement in the record and i will ask senator feinstein if she has more to say on her opening statement and if she doesn't, i'll go to senator -- >> thank you, i do, mr. chairman. i will probably truncate it, even so. but i think it's really important that people, as well as the judge, the nominee, understand how strongly we feel and why we feel that way. i want to talk a little bit about one of the big decisions

that we have the belief that although you told senator collins that you believed it was settled law, the question is really do you believe that it's correct law. and that's roe versus wade. i was in the 50s and 60s active but first as a student at stanford, i saw what happened to young women who became pregnant and then subsequently i sat as an appointee of governor brown's on the term setting and paroleing authority for women in california who committed felonies. i sentenced women who had committed abortions to state prison and granted them pennsylvania -- paroles. i saw both sides. the terrible side and the human and vulnerable side. and when you look at the

statistics during those days, those statistics that an institute have put out are horrendous. for you, the president that nominated you, has said i will nominate someone who is anti-choice, and pro-gun. and we believe what he said. we cannot find the documents that absolve from that conclusion. so what women have won through roe and a host of privacy cases, to be able to control their own reproductive system and privacy rights is very important to this side of the aisle. i hope the other side of the aisle as well. last year you drafted a dissent

in garza versus hargan. a case where a young woman in texas was seeking an abortion. in that dissent you argued that even though the young woman had complied with the texas parental notification law and secured an approval from a judge she should nonetheless be barred. in making your argument, you ignored, and i believe mischaracterized, a supreme court precedent. you reasoned that jane doe should not be unable to exercise her right to choose because she did not have family and friends to make her decision. the argument rewrites supreme court precedent and if adopted, we believe would require courts to determine whether oh young woman had a sufficient support network when making her decision. even in cases where she has

gone to court. this reason, we believe -- i believe, demonstrates that you are willing to disregard precedent and if that's the case, because just saying something is settled law, it really is, is it correct law? the impact of overturning roe is much broader than a woman's right to choose. it is about protecting the most personal decisions we all make from government intrusion. roe is one in a series of cases that upheld an individual's right to decide who to marry, not the government's right. where to send your children to school, the government can't get involved. what kind of medical care you can receive at the end of life. as well as whether and when to have a family. and i deeply believe that all

these cases serve as -- that protect all americans from overinvolvement of the government in their lives and to me that's extraordinarily important. next i would like to address the president's promise to appoint a nominee blessed by the nra. in reviewing your judicial opinions and documents, it's pretty clear your views go beyond being simply pro-gun and i would like to straighten that out. it's my understanding that during a lecture at notre dame law school you said you would be the first to acknowledge that most other lower judges -- court judges have disagreed with your views on the second amendment. for example, in district of columbia versus heller you wrote that unless guns were regulated either at the time of

the constitution was written or traditionally throughout history, they cannot be regulated now. in your own words, gun laws are unconstitutional unless they are, quote, traditional or common in the united states. you concluded that banning assault weapons is unconstitutional because they have not historically been banned. and this logic means that even as weapons become more advanced and more dangerous, they cannot be regulated. judge easter brook, a conservative judge from the seventh circuit, concluded that that reasoning was absurd and he pointed out that a law's existence can't be the source of its own constitutional validity. in fact, i'm left with the fact that your reasoning is far outside the mainstream of legal

thought and that it surpasses the views of justice scalia, who was clearly a pro-gun justice. even scalia understood that weapons that are like m-16 rifles or weapons that are most useful in military service can, in fact, be regulated. and there is no question that assault weapons like the ar-15 were specifically designed to be like the m-16. the united states makes up 4% of the worldwide population. but we own 42% of the world's guns. since 2012, when 20 first grader and six school employees were killed at sandy hook elementary, there have been 273 school shootings. this is an average of five

shootings every month and a total of 462 children, teenagers, teachers, and staff shot and 152 killed. i care a lot about this. i authored the assault weapons legislation that became law for 10 years. and i have seen the destruction. if the supreme court were to adopt your reasoning, i fear the number of victims would continue to grow and citizens would be rendered powerless in enacting senseible gun laws. so this is a big part of my very honest concern. you are being nominated for a pivotal seat. it would likely be the deciding vote on fundamental issues, so during your time in the white

house when you were staff secretary, some people regard it as kind of a monitor monitoring things going in and out but i think it's much more. and you yourself have said that that's the period of my greatest growth. and so we try to look at it and the only way we can look at it is to understand the documents. and it's very, very difficult. i don't want to take too much time but we've heard a lot of noise. behind the noise is really a very sincere belief that it is so important to keep in this country, which is multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-economic, a court that really serves the people and

serves this great democracy. and that's my worry. that's my worry. so i look forward to your statement and answering the questions. thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator hatch for 10 minutes. >> thank you for your tremendous work in organizing this hearing. this has been the most thorough supreme court confirmation process that i've ever participated in. we've received more than twice as many documents for judge kavanaugh as for any supreme court nominee in history. this is a big deal. we have tens of thousands of pages of judge kavanaugh's opinions, speeches, and other writings. this has been an exhaustive process and i want to thank you for your leadership on it. now to our witness, judge kavanaugh, it is good to see you. i've known you for a long time.

this is my 15th and final supreme court confirmation hearing. i participated in the confirmation of every current justice on the court. i've participated in the confirmation of over half of all federal judges now serving in the federal system or who have ever served in the federal system. i know a good nominee when i see one and you are a great nominee. i don't think there is any question about it. i've known you for a long time. i remember when you first came before this committee back in 2004 for your first confirmation hearing. i was the chairman of this committee at the time. i got to know you well. i was impressed by your intellect, your legal ability, and your integrity. all of which were very much notable. at only 39 years of age you knew more about the law than lawyers who have practiced for

a lifetime and you have been an outstanding judge. you have earned the respect of your colleagues. you've learned the respect of the supreme court as well. as you know, the supreme court has adopted the positions in your opinions no less than 13 times. that's something nobody can really argue against. you've authored landmark opinions on the separation of powers, administrative lieu and national security and served as a mentor to dozens of clerks and hundreds of law students male and female. and some of whom did not share your philosophy. your student reviews are off the charts favorable. even by those who may not have completely agreed with your philosophical approaches on

some matters. you volunteer in your community. mr. chairman, i ask for order. you volunteer in the community, coach youth basketball. you are the sort of person many of us would like to have as a friend and colleague. you also apparently like to eat pasta with ketchup. but nobody is perfect. now, this being politics and this being a supreme court confirmation hearing, my democratic colleagues actually -- i have to admit this is -- my democratic colleagues can admit you are actually a good judge and a good person as well. they have to turn the volume up to 11 to try to paint you as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. anyone who knows you knows that ridiculous and the american

people will see soon enough that you are a smart, decent, normal person that just so happens to have been nominated to the highest court in our land. so here are the facts. judge kavanaugh is one of the most distinguished judges. mr. chairman, i think we ought to have this loudmouth removed. we shouldn't have to put up with this kind of stuff. i hope she is not a law student. >> now that we have quiet i would like to explain that i advised two years ago that at my hearings i expected the police to do their job and i expect the committee to go on. but if you don't want to continue -- >> i'm going to continue. >> go ahead. >> here are the facts. judge kavanaugh is one of the most distinguished judges in the entire country. he has served for over 12 years

now on the u.s. court of appeals to the d.c. circuit. the d.c. circuit is often referred to as the -- second highest court in the land because it hears many critically important cases involving agency action and the separation of powers. during his time on the bench, judge kavanaugh has heard over 1,000 cases and written over 300 opinions. his opinions span nearly 5,000 pages in length. what is remarkable about judge kavanaugh's judicial record is not just its length, but its depth and its quality. judge kavanaugh has been a true leader. he has written powerful opinions on the separation of powers and administrative law. he has shown he brings a fair minded approach to questions of criminal law and employment law. on almost every issue of consequence, judge kavanaugh has made a significant

contribution to our nation's jurisprudence and has won respect from both sides of the political spectrum. the committee received letters from former clerks, former colleagues, former students, and former classmates all attesting to judge kavanaugh's sterling character and qualifications. some of whom are democrats. eminent members have written in strong support of judge kavanaugh's nomination. the authors of these letters emphasize that they have different political views and that they do not agree on every subject but to a person they speak of judge kavanaugh's integrity and judgment and they endorse his nomination. i would like to highlight one letter in particular from 18 of judge kavanaugh's former women law clerks. that's all of his former women clerks. all of them who were not

precluded by their current or pending employment from signing the letter. they write that quote judge kavanaugh has been one of the strongest advocates in the federal judiciary for women lawyers, unquote. they detailed the mentoring and encouragement judge kavanaugh has given them in their careers and they say it is not an exaggeration to say that we would not be the professors, prosecutors, public officials and appel yat advocates we are today without his encouragement and support. it bears emphasis these former clerks span the political divide. number went on to clerk for liberal justices. that shows you the high regard judge kavanaugh has across the ideological spectrum. republican and democratic appointed judges alike have hired his former clerks. judge kavanaugh is no extremist.

he is a highly respected, thoughtful, fair-minded judge who is well within the judicial mainstream. look no further the letter the committee received from over 40 members of the supreme court bar supporting judge kavanaugh's nomination. among the signers are people like lisa blatt, deanne maynard and kathleen sullivan. nationally renowned attorneys who practice frequently before the supreme court and the federal courts of appeals and they are not conservatives. to the contrary, they are among the most prominent liberal attorneys at the bar today and in the country. but they know judge kavanaugh. they know his work. they know his character. they know that he is an outstanding judge and they know that he will make an outstanding justice. if we could just get the politics out of this i think we could all agree that judge kavanaugh is a very qualified

nominee with strong backing in the legal community who is well within the judicial mainstream. go ask anyone who practices regularly before the supreme court, who doesn't have a partisan agenda and they'll tell you judge kavanaugh is exactly the kind of person we should have on the court. we should want on the court. indeed, no less than bob bennett, bill clinton's personal lawyer during clinton's presidency wrote to the committee urging support for judge kavanaugh's nomination. here is what he intended to say, quote, as a washington attorney, i can attest to the high esteem in which the bar holds judge kavanaugh. lawyers love arguing before him. for good reason. because they know he will approach every case with an open mind, unquote. then it continues. brett is the most qualified person any republican president could possibly have nominated.

were the senate to fail to confirm brett, it would not only mean passing up the opportunity to confirm a great jurist but also undermine civility in politics twice over. just in playing politics with such an obviously qualified candidate and then again in losing the opportunity to put such a strong add could vait for decency and civility on our nation's highest quote. this is president clinton's personal lawyer during clinton's presidency who litigated against judge kavanaugh. those who know judge kavanaugh hold him in highest regard. it's true of both republicans and democrats. unfortunately we have all these interest groups screaming from the sidelines and putting pressure on my democratic colleagues to make this hearing about politics. to make it about pretty much anything except judge kavanaugh and his qualifications. we have folks who want to run for president, want their moment in the spotlight.

who want that coveted t.v. clip. i wish we could drop all the nonsense. judge kavanaugh is unquestionably qualified. he is one of the most widely respected judges in the country. he is well within the judicial mainstream. anyone who wants to argue otherwise wants to banish half the country from the mainstream. so judge, i'm glad you're here today. i'm sorry you are going to have to go through some of this nonsense that's about to come your way but i hope you do it well. you are smart, and you are a fundamentally decent, good person. anyone who actually knows you knows that to be true. now, mr. chairman, i don't know that the committee should have to put up with this type of insolence that is going on in

this room today. these people are so out of line they shouldn't be allowed in the room. judge kavanaugh, i know how good you are. you deserve this position. i'm proud of the president for nominating you and i wish you the best because we are going to confirm you. >> out of courtesy to the ranking member feinstein, she wants to introduce people who are in the audience and so she can take what time she wants right now. >> i'll be very fast. i would like to recognize mark, the president of the national urban league. melanie campbell, the president and ceo of the national coalition on black civic participation. reverend al sharpton, the president of national action network. the chairman of civil and human rights. the president of naacp.

legal defense fund. kristin clark, president and executive director, lawyers committee for civil rights. and the president and ceo of the national women's law center. i would also like to recognize the father of jamie, one of 17 killed in the parkland shooting. kelly gregory, former airman first class, single mother, business owner living with stage four breast cancer. sarah mcbride, an advocate for lgbt rights. ellis, who works on behalf of people with disabilities. angel young, an enrolled member of the standing rock lakota and a veteran. kim jorgenson gain who advocates for a woman's's right to choose. and a voting rights advocate.

a person fighting for marriage benefits for same sex couples and a member of little rock nine. thank you for this courtesy. i appreciate it. >> chairman leahy. >> i was happy to yield to senator feinstein for that. mr. chairman, the last few minutes we've heard a lot of rhetoric. i think it might serve the committee well to have some reality. i've served in the senate for 44 years. during that span, being able to vote on 19 nominations to the supreme court. i mention this because i have a sense of history. i've never seen in that 44 years so much at stake with a single seat. but i've also never seen such a

dangerous rush to fill it. president trump promised he would only nominate judges to the supreme court who would overturn roe versus wade. judges who would dismantle the affordable care act. judges who would reshape our judiciary. now, if that's not judicial activism, i don't know what is. and judge kavanaugh, with your nomination, the president has made it very clear that he is following through on his promises and many of us feel he is. it seems that you may have intrigued him for another reason, you are expansive view of executive power and executive immunity. you have taken the unorthodox position that presidents should not be burdened with a criminal or civil investigation while in

office. this is -- now we have a president who is declared in the last 24 hours that the department of justice shouldn't prosecute republicans. it's alice in wonderland. i find it difficult that your views escape the attention of president trump who seems fixated on his own ballooning legal jeopardy. when questioning you about these concerns we'll certainly look to your record on the bench, all of us, republicans and democrats agree that we should. indeed your 12 years on the d.c. circuit court of appeals will loom large during these hearings. but the unknown looms even larger. before sitting on the bench, you were a political operative

involved in the most political and partisan controversies of our time. during this time you shared your personal view on contentious issues without regard to restrictions imposed by precedent. and it's precisely those views that are being hidden from us today. the judiciary committee's supreme court hearings are meant to be an examination of a nominee to a lifetime appointment to our highest court. they are intended to give the american people all -- all -- all the american people a genuine opportunity to scrutinize the nominee's judicial philosophy, beliefs and character. because of confirmed with a stroke of a pen a nominee may impact lives for a generation or more. and how far have we fallen?

judge kavanaugh, there are so many things wrong with this committee's vetting of your record. it's hard to know where to begin. i've been on this committee under both republican and democratic leadership. i never thought the committee would sink to this. in fact, you shouldn't be sitting in front of us today. you should be sitting in front of us only after we've completed a review of your record, your vetting is less than 10% complete. in critical ways our committee is abandoning its tradition of exhaustively vetting supreme court nominees. first my republican friends refuse to get records from when you were white house secretary even though you describe those as the most formative for you as a judge.

when you provide advice on any issue that may cross the president's desk. now we know those issues include abortion, same-sex marriage, and torture. and torture. six weeks ago senate republicans huddled in a private meeting with the white house counsel who is here today and hours later the american people were told those records would be off limits. a departure from the committee precedent from 44 years, chairman grassley sent a partisan record to the national archives. not only did it omit all one million records from your three years as staff secretary, it did not even request a privileged log. that means this committee is in the dark as to what specific

documents are being withheld and why. we don't even know what is being hidden. such a move is simply imcompatible with transparency. third, the archives told us they could not even produce this partial records request until the end of october. that's a nonpartisan archives. [more shouting from the crowd] >> mr. chairman, i do not intend at any point to continue what i have to say with such interruptions. i don't care whose side they're on. now, the archives have said they could not produce this

partial records request until the end of october. certainly i would think the united states senate could wait until then, even if it means a supreme court with eight justices for a short time. after all, senate republicans established the tradition of having just eight justices. they did that with their treatment of chief judge merrick garland. it showed they were willing to have patience with filling supreme court vacancies when the first time ever they refused to have a vote on a supreme court nominee either up or down during a presidential election year. and i've been here when they have had in the past such votes. but republicans instead cast aside the archives, they

swapped the nonpartisan review process used for every nominee since watergate for a partisan one. i think you only have to look at watergate to see why we have the nonpartisan process. every nomination since watergate until today. and my question still recurs, what is being hidden? and why? every white house record that we've received was handpicked by your deputy in the bush white house. a hyper conflicted lawyer who also represents a half dozen trump administration officials who are under investigation by prosecutors in the russia investigation. and this partisan lawyer has decided which of your records the senate, but more importantly the american people -- the american people get to

see. countless documents that have been provided contain alterations and omissions with zero explanation. no court in this country, certainly no court that i ever argued cases before would accept this as a legitimate document production. and the united states senate shouldn't, either. and fifth, more than 40% of those documents we have received, almost 190,000 pages are considered committee confidential by chairman grassley. for the vast majority of them there is not even a conceivable argument to restrict them. compare this to the mere 860 documents that were designated committee confidential for justice kagan and that the request was made by the nonpartisan archives, not by this committee.

besides, we saw 99% of her records. and sixth, on friday we learned president trump is claiming executive privilege over an additional 102,000 pages of your records. such a blanket assertion of executive privilege is unheard of in the history of this country. the reason it's unheard of because it is so outrageous. the last time a president attempted to hide his supreme court nominee's records by invoking executive privilege was when president reagan did it for justice william rehnquist. but then republicans and democrats came together, we demanded the documents be released, and president reagan said okay and they were released. boy, how times have changed. and seventh, today we've received less than half of

chairman grassley's partial records request. we're moving forward even though we've received a fraction of the records even republicans claim they needed to vet your nomination just a few weeks ago. then we received an additional 42,000 pages from your record a few hours ago. the notion anyone here has properly reviewed them or even seen them at all is laughable. it's laughable. it doesn't pass the giggle test. that alone would be reason to postpone during normal times. but nothing about this is normal. all told, only 4% -- 4% of your white house record has been shared with the public. only 7% has been made available to this committee. the rest remains hidden from scrutiny. compared this to the 99% of justice kagan's white house

record that was available to all americans as a result of the bipartisan process i ran within ranking member jeff sessions, when senator sessions and i requested it and we got 99%. what is being hidden and why? if i have not been clear i will be so now. today the senate is not simply phoning in our vetting obligation, we're discarding it. it's not only shameful, it is a sham. i felt on the day when i took my oath of office the first time 44 years ago i was told by both the republican and democratic leadership of the senate, people i highly respected, the senate should be and can be the conscience of

the nation. i represented vermont here for 44 years, i served with pride here believing that the senate can be and should be the conscience of the nation. today with this hearing it is not being the conscience of the nation. and for the bits and pieces of your record we've received it appears you provided misleading testimony about your involvement in controversial issues at the bush white house during your previous confirmation hearings. misleading testimony. i asked you about these concerns last month and i want to alert you that i will return to those concerns when you are under oath and i'm asking you questions. it appears the american people will not know the full truth until your full record is public and unfortunately republicans have done their

best to ensure that won't happen. so we begin these hearings with gaping holes spanning multiple years of your career. deeply influenced by your own words your thinking as a judge. and any claim this has been a thorough, transparent process is down right wrong. this is the most incomplete, most partisan, least transparent vetting for any supreme court nominee i have ever seen. and i've seen more of those than any person serving in the senate today. so judge kavanaugh, this hearing is premature. i hope you will use it, though, to answer our questions directly, clearly and honestly. because the american people have real concerns about how your confirmation will affect their lives. i'll conclude with this. supreme court is a guarantor of

our liberties in our republic. few are worthy of taking the seat. only those with unimpeachable integrity. only those who believe that truth is more important than party. only those who are committed to upholding the rights of all americans, not just those in power. as you know, as put in vermont marble, equal justice under law. for the million else of americans fearful that they are on the verge of losing hard-fought rights, that aspiration has never been more important than it is today. frankly, as a member of the supreme court bar and as a united states senator, i feel it's never been more at risk. thank you. >> before i call on senator cornyn, how ridiculous it is to

say that we don't have the records that it takes to determine this person qualified to be on the supreme court when all the documents we have add up to more than we have had for the last five supreme court nominees. how did we make those decisions for those other five? senator cornyn. >> if i could respond to that point. 90% of the documents we haven't seen. not the number of documents. >> i'll be glad to respond to that. >> we wouldn't hire an intern with 90% of their resume and putting somebody on the supreme court. >> senator cornyn. >> thank you, mr. chairman. judge kavanaugh, welcome to you and your family and friends. i'm amazed at the poker faces i've seen on the front row during all of this pandemonium. unlike anything i've seen before in a confirmation hearing. in my view it's not because

your opponents don't know enough about you, it's because they do know all they need to know apparently to oppose your nomination. and even before you've had a chance to answer our questions, including their questions, many of them have made up their minds but the american people have not been introduced to you before. this is an opportunity for all of us to gauge in a question and answer format that will hopefully illuminate why it is so important to have judges who are actually tethered to the text of the laws passed by congress, signed by the president, as well as the constitution of the united states. senate judiciary committee undertakes few more important tasks than the one before us today. last year the committee considered and advanced the nomination of justice neil gorsuch who was one of many outstanding judicial nominees

by president trump. this congress has proudly confirmed not just judge gorsuch but 26 judges to the appellate courts across the nation including three outstanding texans to the fifth circuit court of appeals. historically the confirmation of judges to our highest courts was routine. justice gorsuch was confirmed by a simple voice vote to the court of appeals. not one senator voted against justice kennedy who both you and justice gorsuch clerked for and who you will succeed on the court. not one senator voted against justice scalia's confirmation who you have called a role model and a hero. but that was before judges were viewed as policymakers rather than fair and neutral interpreters of the constitution and the laws drafted by congress. today as i suggested it is a wonderful opportunity to re-examine the proper role for

judges under our constitution and the difference between legislators and judges. as justice gorsuch wrote before he joined the supreme court upholdened and enforcing this -- it was the great project of the late justice scalia's career. justice scalia would always remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and claims about social utility but judges instead should strive to apply the law as it is looking to the text, structure and history, not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences. so this hearing is an outstanding way to remind the american people of the proper role of judges under our constitution. our constitution provides for a federal government of limited and delegated powers with the bill of rights to further protect our individual liberties. to that end, the framers

created three co-equal branches as you know, legislature tour to enact law, executive to enforce them and the judicial branch to settle disputes about the meaning of those laws and the constitution. of course, the legislature could change the laws but only an amendment can change the constitution. for this reasonable alexander hamilton -- mr. chairman, can i pause there until the room is cleared? for this reasonable hamilton wrote the judiciary will be the least dangerous branch because he wrote judges would have neither force nor will but merely judgment. the committee has gathered today to consider whether judge kavanaugh will look at that role and properly exercise the modest and humble power of judgment entrusted to him under

our constitution. i'm confident the senate will find that judge kavanaugh will faithfully and fairly interpret the constitution and the laws of this great nation and i look forward to him succeeding justice kennedy. one reason for that is because i've been acquainted with judge kavanaugh for about 18 years and i can personally attest to his skills as a lawyer. when i was attorney general of texas, as the judge will recall, he helped me get ready for a supreme court argument. [yelling from the audience]

may i proceed, mr. chairman? >> as i was saying -- when i was attorney general of texas i had a chance to argue a couple of cases in front of the united states supreme court. one case judge kavanaugh helped me prepare for was one involving the question of school prayer at a high school football game at the sante fe independent school district high school. after that i was pleased to introduce judge kavanaugh to the judiciary committee when president bush first nominated him to be a judge on the d.c. circuit. what i said back then still stands the test of time today. judge kavanaugh has an unparalleled academic and professional record of service. many will cite his-education and working for the executive branch but he has already exercises excellent judgment in

marrying a texan, ashley from abilene. he is one of the most respected and thoughtful judges in the country. i'm disappointed despite his great qualifications and outstanding records so many of our colleagues across the aisle have announced their opposition even before he was nominated. the level of hype he shallly even by today's standards is extraordinary. members from the other side of aisle including some who serve on this committee have claimed that confirming judge kavanaugh would somehow be complicit in evil and result in the destruction of the constitution. some have even claimed that you testified falsely. we've already heard that alluded to before the committee when you were serving our country in the bush white house. i hope you'll have a chance to

explain the apparent misunderstanding on the part of some senators. and i sincerely hope this week we can all take a deep breath. we're not doing very well so far. and get a grip and treat this process with the respect and gravity it demands. as others have alluded, the american bar association, which some have called the gold standard for judicial evaluations, have aoun on mousely rated you as well qualified for service on the supreme court. and as we've heard a number of lawyers and judges across the spectrum have talked about your qualifications and sung your praises. i'm confident at the end of this hearing your stellar credentials and your body of work as a judge will demonstrate that you properly understand the role of a judge under the constitution and i'm confident you will demonstrate that you will faithfully and fairly interpret the text of the law and the constitution and apply them to the disputes

that come before you. finally, judge, i expect we'll have a conversation or two about this book which you contributed to, and the law of judicial precedent. i know there are a number of questions by members of the senate about how you will regard previously decided cases in the supreme court and i trust you'll give us a scholarly and detailed explanation of that. and demonstrate that many of the concerns that have been expressed about a new justice coming on the court somehow wiping away previous decisions single handedly. not even with the help of other members of the court, is just plain ridiculous and we look forward to asking those questions and getting your answers. thank you very much. >> senator durbin. >> i thank the members of your family who are weathering this hearing. thank you very much for being here today.

this is a different hearing for the supreme court than i've ever been through. it's different in what's happened in this room just this morning. what we've heard is the noise of democracy. this is what happens in a free country when people can stand up and speak and not be jailed, imprisoned, tortured or killed because of it. it is not mob rule. there have been times when it is uncomfortable, i'm sure it was for your children and i hope you can explain this to them at some point. but it does represent what we are about in this democracy. why is this happening for the first time in the history of this committee? i think we need to be honest about why it's happening. i think it's the same reason why when i go home to illinois after being in this public service job for over 30 years i hear a question i've never, ever heard before.

repeatedly. as people pull me off to the side and say senator, are we going to be all right? is america going to be all right? they are genuinely concerned about the future of this country. you come to this moment of history in a rare situation. you are aspiring to be the most decisive vote on the supreme court on critical issues, justice kennedy did that for 12 years. and you are called to that responsibility. and we realize the gravity of that opportunity and that responsibility. secondly, of course, your record and the statements of others suggest there is real genuine concern about changing life and death values in this country because you see things differently. we've heard that over and over again and i think you must understand the depth of feeling

about that possibility. and third, try as they might i'm afraid the majority just can't get beyond the fact there are parts of your public life that they want to conceal. they don't want america to see them. i think that's a serious mistake and i'll make a suggestion at the end of my remarks. but over and above all of those things is this, you are the nominee of president donald john trump. this is a president who has shown us consistently that he is con tem taouous of the rule of law. he has said and done things as president which we have never seen before in our history. he has dismissed the head of the federal bureau of investigation when he wouldn't bend to his will. he harasss and threatens his own attorney general on almost a daily basis in the exercise of his office. and i didn't vote for jeff sessions. but i have to tell you, there should be some respect at least for the office that he serves

in. and it's that president who has decided you are his man. you are the person he wants on the supreme court. you are his personal choice. so are people nervous about this? are they concerned about it? of course they are. i'm sure there will be a shower of tweets sometime later in the day and maybe he will go after me again. be my guest. but the point i'm getting to is if you wonder why this reaction is taking place it's because of what is happening in this country. there are many of us who are concerned about the future of this country and the future of democracy. and you are asking for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land where you will make decisions, the deciding vote on things that will decide the course of history and where we're headed. the senate has a constitutional responsibility to evaluate your nomination. we do know that before you became a judge you were

faithfully advancing the republican party agenda. i jokingly said in one of your previous appearances you are like the forrest gump of republican politics. you always show up in the picture. ken starr, bush versus gore, bush white house, you've been there. before naming you president trump made it clear that he would appoint justices -- only appoint justices to the supreme court who would overturn roe versus wade and the affordable care act. those were his litmus tests. he didn't ask you the questions. he delegated this responsibility to two special interest groups. the federalist society and heritage foundation. and the other groups that are spending millions of dollars in support of your candidacy. they are confident that you'll favor the interests of corporations over workers and give the president wide berth when it comes to executive authority. and your own law clerks, men and women you chose and who wrote the words that had your signature at the bottom of the page have told us what they

think of you. one wrote in an article entitled, quote, brett kavanaugh said obamacare was unprecedented and unlawful. that's one of your clerks. another wrote when it comes to quote, enforcing restrictions on abortion no court of appeals judge in the nation as a stronger, more consistent record than judge brett kavanaugh. big corporate interests solidly behind your nomination. chamber of commerce full support. president trump, whose lawyers say they will fight any effort to subpoena or indict him all the way to the supreme court, that president seems personally eager to have you confirmed as quickly as possible. why are your supporters so confident you'll rule on these issues as you wish and such a sure bet to take their side when in the words of one of your former clerks it's no time for a gamble. i don't think you'll tell us much this week. it's interesting to me that people in your position write all the law review articles and

make all the speeches and come to this room and clam up. don't want to talk about any issues. but that's what i expect. instead we'll be asked to trust if you're confirmed you'll have an open mind, follow the law rather than move the law in the direction of your views. i would like to trust you, but i agree with president ronald reagan, trust but verify. i wanted to trust you the last time you testified before this committee in 2006 but after you were confirmed in the d.c. circuit reports surfaced that contradicted your sworn testimony. you said under oath the following. i was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants. but later just a week or so ago you acknowledged in my office that you were involved. for 12 years you could have apologized and corrected the record but you never did. instead you and your supporters have arg aoufd we should ignore

the sentence which you spoke and somehow conclude your words mean something far different. you are a committed texturalist. if you hold others accountable for their words you should be held accountable for yours. i start these hearings with a question about your credibility as a witness. i know from my history with you things you said need to be carefully verified. it brings us to a major problem. i won't retread the ground about all the documents being withheld. i'll show you a little calendar here that's interesting. there is a 35-month black hole in your white house career where we've been denied access to any and all documents. 35 months in the white house. i asked you in my office during that period of time president bush was considering same-sex marriage and amendment to ban it, abortion, executive power, detainees torture.

supreme court nominees and wiretapping. we mourn the passing of john mccain. in 2004, 2005, i joined john mccain when he led the effort to pass an amendment affirming that torture and cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment would be illegal in america. as a survivor of unspeakable torture john mccain spoke with powerful moral authority about american values during a time of war. you were in the bush white house when that mccain amendment passed. the bush administration did everything in its power to stop john mccain's torture amendment. then after we passed it 90-9 a veto-proof margin president bush issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore the law. john mccain just passed it in congress. when we met in my office you acknowledged that you worked on that signing statement. yet we've been denied any documents disclosing your role or advice to president bush. i asked you if you wrote, edited or proofed documents while you were staff secretary.

time and again you said can't rule it out. judge kavanaugh, america needs to see those documents. we cannot carefully review, advise and decide whether to consent to your nomination without clarity on the record. period of time when you worked in the republican white house led to a change in position on an issue which we have to address directly. your views on executive power and accountability have changed dramatically. when you worked for special counsel ken starr in the late 1990s you called him an american hero for investigating president bill clinton and personally urged starr to be aggressive, confrontational and even graphic in his questions. we've seen your memo on that one. but a few years later after working in a republican white house you totally reversed your position and argued that presidents should be above the law and granted a free pass from criminal investigation while in office. what did you see in the bush

white house that dramatically changed your view? what are your views about presidential accountability today? judge kavanaugh at this moment in our nation's history with authoritarian forces threatening our democracy, with the campaign and administration of this president under federal criminal investigation, we need a direct credible answer from you. is this president or any president above the law? equally important can this president ignore the constitution and the exercise of his authority? you dissented in the seven sky case when the d.c. circuit upheld the affordable care act constitutionality. you criticized the law that this president wants to ignore and abolish and you said the president may decline to enforce the statute that regulates private individuals when the president deems -- when the president deems the statute unconstitutional even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional. this statement by you flies in

the face of marberry versus madison. our north star in the separation of powers. it gives license to this president, donald trump, or any president who chooses to ignore the constitution to assert authority far beyond that envisioned by our founding fathers. there are many people who are watching carefully. i might make a suggestion to you today. it won't be popular on the other side of the aisle. if you believe that your public record is one that you can stand behind and defend, i hope that at the end of this you will ask this committee to suspend until we are given all the documents. until we have the time to review them. and then we resume this hearing. what i'm saying to you is basically this. if you will trust the american people, they will trust you. but if your effort today continues to conceal and hide documents, it raises a suspicion. i'll close, mr. chairman.

i know you're anxious. when i was a practicing lawyer, long time ago in trials, and the other side either destroyed or concealed evidence i knew that i was going to be able to have a convincing argument to close that case. what were they hiding? why won't they let you see the speed tape on that train or the documents they just can't find? you know that presumption now is against you because of all the documents that have held back. for the sake of this nation, for the sanctity of the constitution that we both honor, step up, ask this gathering to suspend until all the documents of your public career are there for the american people to see. thank you, mr. chairman. >> you might think you also, ashley and margaret and eliza for being here. i'm going to start by saying, the fact that there is so much angst over a single nominee, a

single judicial nominee tells you everything you need to know about why it is that we need judges now more than ever were willing to read the law and interpret based on what the law says based on the basis of something else. it also tells you more than anything else you could need to know about the need to restore a discussion of civics in this country, to restore a discussion about federalism and separation of powers. where power is concentrated and where it shouldn't be. what the role of each branch of the federal government is and is not. many of the comments, many of the outburst we've had today suggest that we need to return to some of those fundamental principles that i don't care whether you liberal democrat or a conservative republican or something in between. these principles apply and principles that i think we would do well to restore and focus on

once again. if ever to return to an air of civility, we will return to that era on the basis of those foundational structural principles within our constitution. over the next few days, a few members of this committee are going to ask you a few questions on cases that you've handled as a lawyer, cases that you've decided as a judge, about your record, about your qualifications. on that point about your record in your qualifications, this suggestion that you misled this committee at any point in your previous hearings is absurd and the absurdity of that suggestion will be brought out in the coming days, i am certain of it. some of the questions that will be asked about you will in fact be fair and others will be unfair. i think it's important for us to acknowledge that at the outset. you look back at history,

answering these kinds of questions, this is sort of how the practice of holding these hearings began so the senators could ask nominees how they might vote, how they might rule in particular cases. but this didn't always happen. in fact, it wasn't until 1916 that this even started. there have been 113 justices confirmed to the supreme court so far, the first 66 were confirmed without even holding a hearing. the idea of a hearing is relatively new, about 102 years old, we went from between 125 and 135 years under a constitutional republic without ever a hearing but regardless, we started having hearings just over a century ago. the first supreme court nomination hearing occurred in 1960.

some called for hearing freedom if we are honest with ourselves, honest about history, i think a lot of this might have to do with some sentiment and that he was jewish. but they wanted to determine whether he would use his seat on the supreme court to advocate for some of the things that he had advocated for as a private citizen, as a public interest attorney. they wanted to know how he might vote in particular cases. they didn't ask him to testify significantly, but they did in fact asked that mike asked some outside witnesses what they thought about his nomination. the next important moment one could argue occurred in 1939 when felix frankfurter became the first nominee to himself testify before the committee.

he was controversial in part because he was born overseas but senators also worried that he was erratic based on his defense of anarchists in court. again, senators wanted to share emphasis about how he might rule in particular cases and in particular, what results he might reach in a particular type of case. he significantly declined to engage with senators on those topics and incentives that his public record spoke for itself. his nomination in 1959 was another turning point. senators seeking to resist brown versus board of education, wanted to grill stewart on his views on integration. others still wanted to grill stewart on his views on national security. so senators turned up the heat a little bit more in that hearing,

like frankfurter before him, just a stuart did not provide substantive answers to the questions. when they wanted to know how he might rule in particular cases, he appropriately declined. just as his predecessors had. 28 years later, 28 years after justice stewart came through this committee, the senate considered robert bork's confirmation. in my view, it remains something of a rock-bottom moment for the senate. without getting into the gory details here, i think it suffices to say that senator ted kennedy and judge bork did not agree on certain matters of constitutional law. and kennedy's response was to savage unfairly, in my opinion, the results that judge bork would reach if confirmed to the

court. history shows over the better part of a century, they've gradually created something of a new norm, a norm in which nominees demand that they speak about specific cases in return for favorable treatment from the committee as a jurist are going through this process. nominees for the most part have gracefully resisted trading confirmation in exchange for promises about how they might vote in particular cases brought before them. to give to famous examples, justice scalia refused to say whether marbury versus madison was settled law. >> a fascinating and dramatic start to the hearing. we are going to take a 62nd timeout, you will still see the hearing going on throughout we will have complete coverage throughout the day. keep it here.

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>> back to the opening statements, let's listen in. >> there's a better way for senate to approach this work. this process in my opinion should be about your qualifications, about your character, and perhaps most importantly about your approach to judging your own view of the role of the federal judiciary. it should not be about results in a select number of cases. you are obviously exceptionally well-qualified. even your staunchest critics would not claim otherwise, your academic pedigree, your experience as a practicing lawyer, your experience in government, and your 12 years experience sitting on what many refer to as the second highest court in the land, the u.s. court of appeals for the d.c. circuit. you are independent, he written

that "some of the greatest moments in american judicial history have been when judges stood up to the other branches. we are not cowed and enforced the law." you said that they could not be buff load, influence, or pressured into wearing too much about transient popularity when trying to decide a case and one of the most important duties of a judge is to stand up for the unpopular party who has the correct position. and he lived up to your words during your time on the bench. everyone knows that you served in the bush administration and yet, when you became a judge, in only two years, you ruled against the bush administration a total of eight times. for you, it simply doesn't matter who the parties are, simply doesn't matter that you may have worked for an administration before you became a judge.

the only thing that matters is your commitment to correctly applying the law to the facts of any particular case. as far as your approach to judging, you have appropriate respect for precedent, you've coauthored an 800 page book on president that among other things explains that a change in a courts membership alone should not be open to consideration or justify their reversal. you've explained that for the president to be overruled, you must not be just wrong, but a case with serious practical consequences. each of those cases involved a unanimous decision reached by your colleagues. and you followed a biting precedent even if you believe that finding president was itself wrongly decided.

you decide cases based on legal merits, not based on the identity of the parties and certainly not based on any political beliefs that you may harbor. already heard that your nomination will somehow be bad for women, for the environment, for labor unions, for civil rights, for a whole host of other things that americans hold near and dear. i have a laundry list of cases there's a more fundamental point that needs to be made. the judiciary's decisions are legitimate. only to the extent that they are based on sound legal principle and reasoning. in ruling for a preferred party is not itself a sound legal principle. it's quite to the contrary.

jury rigging decisions and backfilling legal reasoning to reach a particular result, a particularly politically acceptable result in a particular case, no matter how desirable that result might be an instance is not a legitimate mode of traditional decision-making and no free people reporting to have an independent judiciary should ever be willing to settle for that. so i pleaded my colleagues today i believe we are required to do so. the senate is not and never should be a brother stamp when it comes to lifetime appointments. even lifetime appointments on the highest court in the land grade but if you disagree with an opinion he's written, make a legal argument as to that issue. explain why you think it's wron wrong.

and don't complain about the results as if the result itself is proof that he is wrong when you separate out the result from the legal analysis, from the facts and how they interact with the law in that particular case. and don't ask them to make promises about outcomes in particular cases. it is surely unacceptable for the united states senate to do so. judge kavanaugh, i look forward to your testimony and i'm grateful to you and your willingness to serve our country and to be considered for this important role. >> thank you, mr. chairman. when his pattern evidence of bias? in court, pattern is evidence of bias all the time.

evidence on which jerry's and trial judges rely to show discriminatory intent, to show a common scheme, to show bias. when does a pattern proved bias? i wish this were an idle question, it's relative to the pattern of the robinsons court. when it's republican majority goes off on partisan excursions through the civil law. that's when all five republican appointees, the roberts find, we can call them, go rating off together at no democratic appointee joins them. does this happen often? the roberts five have gone on

almost 80 of these partisan excursions since roberts became chief. that's a lot of times. and there's a feature to these 80 cases, they almost all implicate interests important to the big funders and influencers of the republican party. when the republican justices go off on these five justice partisan excursions, there is a big republican corporate or partisan interest involved 92% of the time. the tiny handful of these cases that don't implicated interest of the big republican influencers is so few that we can set them aside. let's look at the 73 cases that all implicate a major republican

party interest. again, 73 is a lot of cases at the supreme court. is there a pattern to these 73 cases? yes, there is. any time the big republican interest is involved, the big republican interest wins, every time. let me repeat and 73 partisan decisions where there's a big republican interest at stake, the big republican interest win wins. every time. that will reliably give them wins. with a big win sometimes. note that when the roberts five settles up, these so-called conservatives are anything but additionally conservative.

they readily overturn precedent, toss out statutes passed by wide bipartisan margins, and decide on broad constitutional issues that they need not reach. modesty, regionalism, all these supposedly conservative judicial principles all have the footprints of the roberts five all across their backs wherever those principles got in the way of those wins for the big republican interest. the litany of roberts five decisions explains why big republican interests want judge kavanaugh on the court so badly. so badly that republicans trampled so much senate

precedent to push him through. so let's review the highlights reel. what do big republican interests want? first, they want to win elections. what has the roberts five delivered? helped republicans gerrymander elections, 5-4, licensed to gerrymander. helped republicans keep minority voters away from the polls. shelby county, 5-4, 5-4 and abbott versus perez 5-4 despite the trial judge finding the texas legislature actually intended to target and suppress minority voters. in the big one, help corporate front group money flood elections. big money interests love unlimited power to buy elections, lobby, and threatened them bully congress. mccutcheon, 5-4 counting the

concurrence, but look 5-fourth and the infamous grotesque 5-4 citizens united decision which i believe spans on the courts wall of shame. what else do big influencers want? to get out of courtrooms, big influencers hate courtrooms because they are lobbying and it doesn't work, at least is not supposed to. in a courtroom, big influencers used to getting their way have to suffer the indignity of equal treatment. so the roberts five protects corporations from group class action lawsuits, comcast, 5-4, and this past term epic systems 5-4. the roberts five helps corporations steer workers away from courtrooms and into mandatory arbitration.

italian colors, rent-a-center, all of roberts five. epic systems does double duty here because now workers cannot even arbitrate their claims as a group. hindering access to the courthouse for plaintiffs generally, 5-4. protecting corporations from being taken to court by employees harmed through pay discrimination, ledbetter 5-4. age discrimination, 5-4. harassment, 5-4. in retaliation, 5-4. even insulating corporations from liability of international human rights violations, 5-4. corporations aren't in the constitution. juries are. they're the one element designed to protect people against encroachments by private wealth and power. so of course, the roberts five

rules for wealthy powerful corporations over jury writes every time without a mention of the seventh amendment. what's another when? a classic, helping big business bust unions. 5-4 and 5-4 overturning a 40 year precedent. lots of big republican influencers are polluters who like to pollute for free. so the roberts five delivers partisan decisions that let corporate polluters pollute, to pick a few, if i have and four. national association of homebuilders weakening protections for endangered species, 5-4. michigan versus epa helping air polluters, 5-4 and in the case of emerging climate havoc, there's the procedurally apparent 5-4 public decision to stop the epa clean power plan.

pattern. then come roberts five bonus decisions advancing a far right social agenda. gonzalez versus carhart upholding restrictive abortion laws, hobby lobby granting corporations religious rights over the health care of their employees, letting the states deny women truthful information about their reproductive choice choices. all 5-4, all republican. mcdonald which reanimated for the gun industry a former chief justice once called a fraud, both decisions 5-4, this year trump versus hawaii, 5-4 rubber stamping the muslim travel ban and encase wall street was feeling left out, helping insulate investment bankers from fraud claims, 5-4. pattern. no wonder the american people feel the game is rigged. here's how the game works. big business and picked neil gorsuch and now you.

as the white house counsel admitted, they can source the federal society for the selection. exactly how the nominee picked who was in the room and where it happened and who had a vote or veto and what was said or promised, that's all a deep dark secret. then big business in partisan groups had the transitional network which runs dark many political campaigns influence senators and confirmation votes as they've done for neil gorsuch and now for you. who pays millions of dollars for that? and what their expectations are is a deep dark secret. these groups also fund republican election campaigns with dark money and keep the identity of big donors a deep, dark secret and of course, 90% of your documents are too was a deep, dark secret. then, was the nominees on the court, the same business front groups with ties to the koch brothers and other funders of the republican political machine

fire friend of the court for amicus briefs to signal their wishes to the roberts five, who was really behind those friends? is another deep, dark secret. it has gotten so weird that republican justice is now even send hints back to big business interests about how they like to help them next and then big business lawyers rush out to lose cases, to lose cases just to brush up before the friendly court pronto. that's what happened in that episode. the u.s. chamber of commerce is the biggest corporate lobby of them all. for a big coal, big oil, big pharma, big guns, you name it. and this year with justice gorsuch writing with the roberts five, the chamber won 9 out of 10 cases it weighed in on. if the roberts five since 2,006 has more than three quarters of

their votes. this year and all civil cases, they voted for the chamber's position fully 90% of the time and then 5-4 cases i've highlighted, 100%. people are noticing. the federal court watchers describe the courts service to republican interest. he wrote that on the supreme court, roberts has served the interests of the contemporary republican party. greenhouse has said the republican appointed majority is committed to harnessing the supreme court to an ideological agenda. orenstein described the new reality of today's supreme court. it has polarized along partisan lines in a way that parallels other political institutions and the rest of society and the fashion we have never seen. and the american public knows i it. the american public thinks the supreme court treats corporations more favorably than

individuals compared to vice versa by a 7-1 margin. 49% of americans think corporations get special treatment there. now let's look at where you fit in. i republican political operative your whole career who's never tried a case. you made your political bones helping the salacious prosecution of president clinton and licking prosecution information to the press. as an operative in the second bush white house, you cultivated relationships with political insiders like nomination guru leonard leo, the federalist society architect of your court nominations. on the d.c. circuit, you gave more than 50 speeches to the federalist society. that looks like auditioning. on the d.c. circuit, you showed your readiness to join the roberts five with big political winds for republican and corporate interests. publishing special interest money into elections my protecting corporations from

liability, helping polluters pollute, striking down common sense quick gun regulations, keeping injured plaintiffs out of court against corporations and perhaps most importantly for the current occupant of the oval office, expounding a nearly limitless vision of presidential immunity from the law. your alignment with the right wing groups who came before you as friends of the court, 91%. when big business trade associations weighed in, 76%. this, to me, is what corporate capture of the course looks lik like. there are big expectations for you. the shadowy dark many front group, the judicial crisis network is spending tens of millions and dark money to push for your confirmation. they clearly have big expectations about how you will rule on dark money. the nra has poured millions into your confirmation of promising their members that you will break the tie. they clearly have big expectations on how you will vote on guns.

white house counsel admitted there was a coherent plan here. were actually the judicial selection and the deregulatory effort are really the flip side the same coin. the big polluters clearly have big expectations for you on their deregulatory effort. finally, you come before us dominated by a president named in open court as directing criminal activity and a subject of ongoing criminal investigation. if you are in that seat because the white house has big expectations that he will protect the president from the due process of law, and should give every senator pause. tomorrow, we will hear a lot of confirmation etiquette. it's mostly a sham. you know the game in the bush

white house, you coached judicial nominees to just tell senators that they have a commitment to follow supreme court precedent that they will adhere to statutory text that they have no ideological agenda. fairy tales. i his hearing, just as roberts infamously said he just called balls and strikes but this pattern, 73-0 of the roberts five qualifies him to have nascar style corporate badges on his robes. alito said in his hearing what a principal story this was, an important limitation on the court. then he told the federalist society it means to leave things decided when it suits their purposes. course is delivered the key fifth vote in the union busting jenna's decision. he also had pleasure in his hearing to follow the law of judicial precedent. assured us he was not a

philosopher, and promised to give equal concern to every person, poor or rich, mighty or meek. how did that turn out? great for the rich and mighty. neil gorsuch is the single most corporate friendly judge on a court already full of them ruling for big business interests and over 70% of cases and in every single case for his vote was determinative. the president early on assured evangelicals his supreme court picks would attack roe v. wade. despite confirmation assurances about precedent, your own words make clear you don't really believe roe vs. wade is settled law since the court as you said you can overrule its president. mr. chairman, we have seen this movie before. we know how it ends. there is no consequence to

telling fairy tales about stare decisis and then writing off with the roberts five, trampling across whatever gets in the way of letting those big republican interest keep winning 5-4 partisan decisions. 73 to zero, every time. thank you, mr. chairman. >> chairman, i have some documents, can they be entered into the record? >> without objection. they met thank you, mr. chairman. judge kavanaugh, welcome, welcome to your family, dear friends demonstrating your good judgment, your wife was born and raised in west texas and you ng have been friends of heidi in mind for for 20 years. thank you for your decades of public service and i'm sorry that your daughters had to endure the political circus of

this morning. that is the last row that is washington in 2018. they met at the hearing continues, some breaking news now. of the arizona governor has made a decision on replacing john mccain and that position and that will be former senator john kyle. he is and is confirmation room, he has the shirt by taking this nomination across the finish line they think, now he will be a senator who will vote on this nomination. >> interesting turn of events and now that will take us back to 51 for republican senators, the thinking was they were not going to pick someone who wasn't willing to stay in that seat or to run again for that seat. we will see what john kyle's plans are in the longer term as we learn more. >> official announcement coming at the top of the hour. we will take another short break, he was he the hearing continued through the break and then we will take you back to senator ted cruz from texas as our coverage continues.

>> has produced 511,948 pages of documents. that includes more than 17,000 pages in direct response to this committee's written questionnaire, which is the most comprehensive response ever submitted to this committee. in the more than a half million pages of documents turned into this committee is more than a number of pages we received for the last five supreme court nominees combined. listen to that fact again, the over half million documents turned over to this committee is more than the last five nominees submitted to this committee combined. what's all the fuss over the documents that are not turned over? most of those confirmed his

three years of the staff secretary for george w. bush. many people don't know what a staff secretary does. into and out of the oval office. critically, a staff secretary is not the author of the paper coming into and out of the oval office. that paper is typically written by the attorney general the staff secretary is simply the funnel for collecting their views and then for transferring the paper back and forth. in other words, those documents written by other people say nothing, zero about judge kavanaugh's views and say nothing, zero about what kind of justice judge kavanaugh would make. but they are by necessity the most sensitive and confidential documents in the white house. they are the documents that are going to the president.

this is the advice and deliberations of the president at the senior level and the staff secretary is the conduit for those documents. so why is it the democrats are putting so much energy in saying hand over all of those document documents? because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that president george w. bush's white house team is not going to allow every piece of paper that went to the president to be made public anymore than any other white house would. republican or democrat, no white house would allow every piece of paper that went to and from the president to be made public. indeed, there are rules and laws and procedures for when and how presidential papers become public. and the reason the democrats are fighting so loudly on this issue is they are making a demand they know is impossible to meet and is utterly irrelevant to what actually judge kavanaugh things, believes, or has said. it would open up all sorts of fishing expeditions to attack,

relitigate george w. bush's record as president and what senior advisors might or might not have said. but it is at the end of the day simply an attempt to distract and delay and indeed, the multiple motions we've seen from democrats the latest confirmation, that reveals the whole joke. their objective is the delay. so what is this fight about? is not about documents, not about your production credentii believe this fight is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt by our democratic colleagues to relitigate the 2016 presidential election. 2016 2016 was a hard-fought elen all around. and it was the first president election in 60 years where americans went to the polls with a vacant seat on the supreme court. one of the next president would fill. americans knew who had been in

that seat, the late justice antonin's glia, one of the greatest justice is to sit on the supreme court and it was the first time since president dwight d. eisenhower's reelection campaign it is supreme court was directly on the ballot. both candidates knew the importance of the vacant supreme court seat and it was a major issue of contention in the presidential election. donald trump and hillary clinton were both clear about what kind of justices and judges they would appoint. during all three presidential debates, both candidates were asked what qualities are most important to them when selecting a supreme court justice. secretary clinton's answer was clear. she wanted a supreme court justice who would be a liberal progressive willing to rewrite the u.s. constitution, willing to impose liberal policy agendas that she could not get through the democratic process amount of the congress of the united states would not adopt but that she hoped five unelected lawyers would force on the american people.

that's what hillary clinton promised for who judicial nominees. then candidate donald trump gave a very different answer. he said he was looking to appoint judges in the mold of justice for scalia. if he wanted to appoint judges that would interpret the competition constitution, interpret the statutes according to the texan he would uphold the rule of law and treat parties fairly regardless of who they are or where they come from. then candidate also did something that no presidential candidate has done before, he published a list of nominees that he would choose from when filling justice scalia's seat providing unprecedented transparency to the american people. all of this was laid before the american people as they went to the polls on november 8th, 2016. and the american people made a choice that night. my democratic colleagues are not happy with the choice of the american made. but as president obama famously

said, elections have consequences. because the american people had the chance to vote a national referendum on the direction of the supreme court, i said a number of times that justice gorsuch's nomination and judge kavanaugh's nomination have almost a super legitimacy and that they were ratified, they were decided by the american people in a direct vote in 2016. ends of the democratic obstruction today is all about trying to reverse that election. they were not happy with the choice the american people want. and there's a reason of the american people want strong constitutionalists on the u.s. supreme court. most americans, and i know the overwhelming majority of text want judges who will follow the law and will not impose their policy preferences on the rest of us and who will be faithful to the constitution and the bill of rights. justices who will uphold

fundamental liberties like free speech, like religious liberty, the second amendment, that's what this election is about, and if you look at each of these, let's take free speech. it's worth noting that in 2014, every democratic member of this committee voted to amend the united states constitution to repeal the free speech provisions of the first amendment. and sadly, every democrat in the senate agreed with that positio position. voting to give congress unprecedented power to regulate political speech. it was a sad day for this institution years earlier, ted kennedy, the great liberal lion had opposed a similar effort and said we haven't amendment the build bill of rights, now is not the time to start. ted kennedy was right then and not a single democrat in the u.s. senate had the courage to agree with ted kennedy and

support free speech. indeed, they voted party line to repeal the free speech provisions of the first amendment. if that is radical, that is extreme it is part of the reason the american people voted for a president who would put justices on the court will protect their free speech. how about religious liberty? religious little wow liberty is a fundamental protection. it got an extreme radical. democratic colleagues want justices who will rubber-stamp efforts like the obama administration's efforts litigating against the little sisters of the poor. if litigating against catholic nuns trying to force them to pay for abortion inducing drugs and others. that is a radical and extreme proposition and to show just how dramatic senate democrats have gotten, every single senate democrat just a few years ago voted to gut the religious freedom restoration act. the legislation that passed

congress of the overwhelming bipartisan support in 1993. send to law by bill clinton in two decades later, the democratic party has determined the religious freedom is inconvenient for their policy and political objectives. they want justices that will further that assault on the religious liberty. and finally, let's take the second amendment. the presidential debates hillary clinton explicitly promised to nominate justices who would overturn color versus district of columbia. heller is the landmark decision issued by justice scalia, likely the most significant decision of his entire tenure on the bench and it upheld the individual rights to keep and bear arms. hillary clinton was quite explicit. she wanted judges that would vote to overturn heller at a number of our democratic colleagues, that's what they want as well. overturning heller would be a truly radical proposition. to understand why coming up to understand what they said.

they said the second amendment protects no individual right to keep and bear arms whatsoever. it protects nearly a collective right of the militia. the consequence of that radical proposition would mean that congress could pass a law making it a felony, a criminal offense for any american to own any firearm. and neither you nor i nor any american would have any individual right whatsoever under the second amendment, it would effectively erase the second amendment from the bill of rights. that is a breathtakingly extreme proposition. it is what hillary clinton promised her justices would do and at the end of the day, that's what this fight is about. we know that every democratic member of this committee is going to vote no. we don't have to speculate. every single one of them has publicly announced their voting no. doesn't depend on what they read in documents, doesn't depend on what judge kavanaugh says at

this hearing, they announced ahead of time they are voting no and most of the democrats in the senate have announced that to the full senate but everyone should understand judge kavanaugh has handed over more documents than any nominee, more than the last five combined republican and democratic nominee, not about documents, not about qualifications, not about record. but it is about his politics. it is about democratic senators trying to relitigate the 2016 election and just as importantl importantly, working to begin litigating the 2020 presidential election. but they had an opportunity for the american people to speak, they voted in 2016 and they wanted judges and justices to be faithful for the constitution, that's why am confident at the end of what shakespeare would describe as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, i am confident that judge kavanaugh will become just as kavanaugh

and will be confirmed to the united states supreme court. thank you, mr. chairman. we met we are going to take a break now. wait a minute. we are going to take a break now, 30 minutes is what the democrats would like to have, so we will return at 1:17, and gorsuch returned about 10 minutes later so be on time please. >> this hearing, very interesting. the brett kavanaugh confirmation hearing. you see chuck grassley talking to dianne feinstein after some fireworks that were promised in the questioning turned out that they were fireworks at the beginning of this entire hearing, and it didn't get underway for about an hour, hour, interrupted numerous times by protesters but really

interrupted over the battle over documents and how many documents need to be out there, whether democrats have enough time to look at all of these documents. it's been something. >> incredible, right out of the gate senator kemal harris piped in, made her feelings know that she felt they should adjourn, this whole thing should not hapn today at all, richard blumenthao chimed in. and it went back and forth for really prolonged period of time with senator grassley trying to balance letting them say their piece essentially but also respecting the fact that they were there for the hearing and that he felt procedurally desire to adjourn was not something that could be done at this stage in the game but very dramatic right out of the gate today. >> let's bring back our panel, fox news senior political analyst, anchor of the daily briefing and cohost of the five dana perino and "fox news sunday" anchor chris wallace.

when we cost to this, we thought here we go, some speeches but right off the bat, democrats made their ready orchestrated and laid out argument. >> there was really not an argument for the most part about the nominee himself or about his judicial philosophy were about his decisions that he's rendered, it was an attempt to delay of the proceeding. as far as we know, the votes are there to confirm. democrats seem not to find issues that they can pull off a couple of republican votes which is what they need to do. so they are playing for time. the documents that are being demanded are really not directly relevant to his role as a judge which is what we are looking at here. they are an attempt to find something somewhere, some statement, some suggestion, some opinion he may have expressed that would go against the grain of american thinking and they could build up to deny confirmation. that's what it's all about and if they get the documents, they

might find something which is unlikely and if they don't, they get to obstruct and delay to the extent they can which after grassley patiently waited them out, the matter is preceded. about an hour and a half behind schedule but on we go with the long droning statements by the senators. >> it seems that obviously there is a long memory over merrick garland and the feeling when gorsuch was chosen is that he was replacing scalia, that was a one of our one. replacing kennedy is a different thing, it's a quartet. in many ways and i remember all of us talking about the fact that during the gorsuch hearing, the next one has the potential to really be a huge fight and it feels like that was the ever that they had left in their liver for democrats to blockade as much as they could this morning. >> what surprises me is they haven't argued that so much. if you heard from sheldon whitehouse, the democrat from rhode island, he talked a bit about how the roberts court, the

roberts five i now even more solid republican majority with kennedy, a swing voter replaced by kavanaugh that it will be even more reliably conservative, but there hasn't been a lot of talk about abortion, there hasn't been a lot of talk about health care or affirmative action. i thought the most interesting exchange into dueling speeches, one was dick durbin. the democrat from illinois, and he said at one point you are the nominee of president donald john trump. and he talked about trump being contemptuous to the rule of law, harassing and threatening his own attorney general on an almost daily basis and he said and it's not the president who decided you are his man and that was ineffective responded to by senator ted cruz of texas who said this is an attempt to relitigate by democrats want to relitigate the 2016 campaign.

i think it's always going to be a very politically fraught nominee because of the fact that you're getting a reliable either liberal or democrat, in this case it's a conservative to replace a swing voter in anthony kennedy but i think also surrounded by the fact that this is nominee of donald j. trump and an awful lot of the democrats on that committee can't stand the idea that trump is going to put his man and his mark on the supreme court perhaps for another 30 years. >> you heard senator cruz make the case there that they have more than 480,000 documents is by the documents they said they don't have because of the executive privilege. he's met with 65 senators so far and saying that one of the democrats on that committee is going to vote for him. they've all already announced that they're voting no. >> they are all committed no, and some of them including senator from hawaii wouldn't

even meet with brett kavanaugh for a courtesy meeting that he had conducted in the past several weeks. i don't think there's any document that might be revealed that would change their mind toward a "yes." so based on an hour and a half today, is very interesting learning that chuck schumer, senate minority leader, at a conference call yesterday to coordinate all of this today so that they could show the democratic base that we are trying to do something, we are arguing on process and i think an hour and a half to wait for a lifetime appointment is probably okay. >> make no mistake about it, the resistance to this nominee is not simply because he's a trump nominee or any of that. the real reason is this. democrats and liberals for decades now have relied heavily on the supreme court and the rest of the judiciary to give them policy victories that they could not turn in legislatures or in congress. and they've gotten on abortion, got an a on a number of other things.

and it is the judging philosophy that has allow that to happen that conservatives have resiste resisted. in their view is of course if you can't find it in the constitution, then you can't just pick up some vibe somewhere about privacy or in the case of anthony kennedy, he picked up kind of a dignity vibe out of the constitution is to have been working there seemingly unnoticed for centuries. and generate that into a new right. and down deep, this is what this is all about and his wife are the left, the court is a very, very big deal. it's a big deal for the right too, but they're trying to play defense about what they consider is the onslaught of creation of new rights by liberal judges. and this is what it is all about. >> does not go directly to the heart of why a lot of people voted for president john? even if they didn't like him, they wanted this remake of the court which is also happening as we know that many levels.

60 something judges that have been appointed under the president. >> there have and he was viewed with considerable suspicion by republican thinkers and republican voters and his promise to pick judges and justices of the stripe that he has so far chosen went a long way towards solidifying him with them and i you see him carrying it out. >> i just want to say one thing in defense of the chairman of the committee chuck grassley and i say this as a father of six because my reaction as i heard the democrats, and it was clearly orchestrated that first kemal harrison and booker and they all went down and each had a slightly different point, but they obviously were just trying to delay this as long as they could and my initial reaction, my kids would testify to this was to banged the gavel and say we are going to go out and that's it. i actually think that it took a long time and there were a lot of viewers out there who are frustrated but there was a certain brilliance on the part of grassley to just let them talk themselves out and had a

certain point, even they had to admit not only has everything been said, but everything has been said by everybody. so they just ran out of space. >> is a better parent than you. >> absolutely. we like chuck grassley. >> done it that way before. the breaking news we brought you was that senator john keil, former senator from arizona now appointed by arizona governor doug ducey. i said earlier that he was the sherpa in the hearing room. he was absent today and that's why. >> he says he won't run in 2020. the going to have another race ahead of them in a senate race in arizona. a quick break, we'll be right back with more coverage of the senate judiciary hearing for judge kavanaugh.

>> welcome back, everybody. i martha maccallum. >> bret: and i bret baier. it's been quite a morning already heading into the afternoon. a bit of a lunch break, and we are hearing from all of the senators, their opening statements. then we will hear from the nominee himself, brett kavanaugh. shannon bream is on capitol hill standing vigil over the committee hearing, there. quite a start, shannon. >> it's quieter now, but there are plenty of dust up happening with all the various democrat senators trying to make their points, trying to move to adjourn, arguing back and forth with the chairman, senator chuck grassley. he said "listen, i've got plenty

of patients. we can be here saturday, sunday, as long as the stakes. i will hear you out, let you say we have to say, but we will do this hearing." it became apparent that his patience was wearing a bit thin because he wanted to get to the content of the hearing. it has been sprinkled numerous protests. at the window where we are, the protests are primarily right below where we are. many different things, this is what democracy looks like. i'm going to die if you actually confirm kavanaugh, women will be focused stomach forced to go to back-alley-oop abortions. many different. it's funny to think that they didn't even have hearings as we know them today. until 1955, that was the first time they were having them in public, and that they sat down the nominees and answered questions. it's a relatively new phenomenon, and this will be one for the history books on many different levels. brett kavanaugh has boiled down what he thinks it takes to be a

good judge. he said "don't be a jerk." and people said that they were that could have been thrown around today. they are trying to play nice now, and they are on lunch break. we will see where it goes from here. >> martha: let's go to mike emanuel, chief correspondent on capitol hill watching the fireworks this morning as we get ready for round two. mike? >> good afternoon to you, i'm standing outside the main the hearing room here in the office building. we've got some folks lined up behind me waiting to go in for the afternoon session. we will hear more opening statements after the break, it will be interesting to see at as these members meet whether we hear some your arguments this afternoon. then we will ultimately get to hear from brett kavanaugh himself. we got to see the image this morning, him walking in with his young daughters and his wife, who we he met working for the h of administration. we will hear his own words, his commitment to basically be a

fair empire on fire, referee oe law, and not rewrite law from the bench. it should be something to watch this afternoon as we get to hear. if we get some more fireworks after lunch. martha, brett? >> martha: great have you with us today. let's bring in our panel once again, senior political analyst brit hume, dana perino, and chris wallace. as we get ready for this round two, you brought up dick durbin. he asked brett kavanaugh. if you're a manager word, will you please, when you have your moment to speak, suggest that we all just take a break so that we can read these 42,000 pages that came in the other night before we continue? any chance we will see that happen? >> i will make you a bet on this if you'd like to come of that it's not going to happen. [laughter] >> i don't think brett kavanaugh is going to act on his own to defend these hearings. it has struck me that some of

the talk by the democrats -- ye yes, whether it's a liberal nominee form of the republicans, if it's a conservative nominee from the democrats -- you get criticism of the records. it has struck me that an awful lot of this has been quite personal and almost insulting in terms of what they have said about to brett kavanaugh. they say he lied to the committee during an earlier judicial confirmation hearing about whether or not he was involved in the bush administration and discussions of terrorism, and on and on. there's been a kind of nasty tone. that's one thing i'm going to be looking for today to see if that happens. the other is, the highlight of this in the end of today is not to hear from the senators, it will be to hear from kavanaugh himself. he is going to make a statement at the end. his introductory statement. probably five to 10 minutes, and i think all of us who heard it would agree that the gold standard was justice john roberts in 2005 who, after a full day of talking, sat there and made a perfectly cogent

argument for about 10 minutes without a single note. i was talking to lindsey graham, who is at that hearing, and he said "roberts is the gold standard for judicial nominees. nobody else has ever measured up, republican or democrat." he said he went to three days of hearing, not just opening statement. he never had a single one. >> bret: the democrats have already made their stance on the documents, the process. we are told there are people on capitol hill that the democrats are going to challenge on substance. his previous statements to the senators, also under both in previous hearings. obamacare and abortion. specifically. >> martha: i would also add guns to that, because dianne feinstein, the chairman, she said specifically to him that she has that. interesting to watch some of these democrats. dick durbin's speech was quite the statesman-like, he's not in a tough reelection right now. it is dianne feinstein who has a

tough reelection for her senate seat right now. she is being attacked from the left. she has to figure out a way to open up a lane to make yourself get through that. i think when brett kavanaugh finally speaks that the contrast between his demeanor, his judicial temperament, his ability to speak as a gentleman of washington, d.c., but also a man, a family man, as we have been talking about with his family there today -- the contrast will be so stark it, and like when roberts spoke of, or when you're such finally had a chance to speak, the american people seem like it's a good guide to me. >> i was watching some of his clerks talk about him last week. to a person, they talk about as personable nature, that he is humble, that he is charitable, they couldn't have said enough nice things about him. i can imagine he will be pressed, as chris was saying, on many of the controversies that have come up in looking at his record. you do see things in a certain

way when you are representing a president, advising a president, different from the way you rule when you are a judge. he's going to have to have a nice-guy demeanor, but also be firm on that. >> it surprised me that the tones of the democrats and the way they are pursuing this, the way their questions -- which will undoubtedly be extremely aggressive -- will approach him. he has an opportunity by display of proper temperament to be displayed to the national audience. has anything that kavanaugh's opponents have done today advanced to the cause of peeling off a couple of republican senators? i really don't think so. i think someone like susan collins, who is a person who cares about senator decorum and its traditions and so forth, saw the circus that was stage here -- she would look in here and say she would be on board with the democrats. >> the fact they went down that

road means they don't think that collins and murkowski are gettable. >> that's right. where they do is make as big a display of resistance as they can for the sake of their constituencies, and take it from there. >> it was interesting, the follow-up, that you can somehow tell the difference in the way that different democrats are approaching this by whether or not they face tough reelection fights in 2018. add to that that there are three members of this committee who potentially could be democratic contenders for 2020, for the presidential race, and they were the very first who started the opposition -- the raucous opposition. that was kamala harris, and cory booker, amy klobuchar. all democratic senators. they were the ones, kind of along blumenthal, leading the charge. trying to break this up, trying to somehow throw a wrench into

the cogs of this machinery. there was no question in my mind, they were appealing to the active leftist democratic presidential base. >> they were going to vote no. >> i was going to add to that, cory booker, while he is speaking, sing to the chairman grassley that this process is horrible and he can't believe he's done this, "we want to look at more documents, be more deliberative," he was sending out his campaign arm a fund-raising email and sing "please donate." and the headline was "stop kavanaugh." he doesn't have an open mind when it comes to this hearing. >> bret: let's now turn to judge andrew napolitano. judge, you've been watching this. your thoughts on the earlier speeches and their reaction to all this? >> i was quite surprised at the acerbic tone and the lack of civility that the democrats fomented right from the start this morning. they are apparently still

brooding over the manner in which judge merrick garland, president obama's nominee to replace the late justice scalia was treated by the republican senate two years ago, and they have obviously concluded that they lack the votes to defeat the kavanaugh nomination. so, if you can't interfere with a nomination, let's interfere with the process. i'm not so sure that this plays well with the democratic base, or even with independence. it probably does, as i think chris wallace pointed out, play more with their leftish people out there. they must have made a determination that this is what that crowd wants to hear, and this is what we are going to give them. much of their complaints about judge kavanaugh are complaints about the person who nominated him, or the supreme court as it existed today. for neither of which he can bear any measure of responsibility whatsoever. i know judge kavanaugh. he is the guy next door.

once he starts chatting, i think a lot of this bitterness will either go away or will seem childish by comparison. >> bret: judge, as always, thank you. we will head back as this hearing continues. one big piece of news dropping this afternoon, the latest bob woodward book about the trump presidency getting out there today. "the washington post" having a detailed piece about that book. chris, there are some quotes in here that are quite something about this president and this administration. >> woodward -- and i know there are people that swear by him, and swear at him -- he has talked obviously to a lot of sources, particularly in the first year of the trump administration home it was every man for himself. everybody was talking to everybody, there were all these different power centers. we haven't gotten to the serious parts of the book, it talks at great length about the policy process in north korea and continuing the war in afghanistan.

what you get is a lot of the top people. they are quoted by name, but we are not told the source that give us this information. john kelly comes out of the meeting and says "the president is a dope," or john madison says "he's a fifth or sixth grader." it's shocking, it's kind of entertaining. i don't know that it's particularly surprising in the sense that we've heard this before. my guess is as a going to change. we will talk about it, because it will be catnip for washington. i don't know that it will change a lot of minds about donald trump. >> what you see in the excerpts that we've seen from the book is that it's a volcanic president who lays about himself and the most demeaning ways of people around him, walks up to the edge of what would be incredible disastrous decisions all the time, prepared to do this, that, and the other thing. restrained, apparently, by aides all around him much of the time. there is an account and there of

a document he's about to sign, they took it off his desk. what does that say to the people in the never trump a movement on the right who don't think that people serving in the administration should do so, because it participates in this fiasco of a presidency? it seems to me that the lesson to take away from this is "thank god for the people around trump who are keeping him on the straight and narrow to the extent they can." that the service to the country without question. >> he's got two military people right around him, general john kelly and general mattis, who are both referred to, here, dana. what is your take when you read what woodward's interpretation of what's going on inside the white house? >> of the bush administration was on the receiving end, i believe four woodward books. i think the first two, there was participation. the third one, it doesn't ever really go your way.

it's not propaganda for yourself to participate. so we didn't participate in the third. that didn't work out either, so we tried to participate in the fourth. a lot of it will be about process. who are you are anonymous sources? well, bob woodward's pretty meticulous. there is a tape out there, but he's talking to president trump today. recently explaining how he tried to get in to be able to talk to the president. he said "nobody told me, because i would have talked to you." even if he had talked to bob woodward, he would have had all these other things. it's a book they will have to weather. i don't know if there will be any additional changes from it. it's very different, though, from anna omarosa book or "fire and fury." bob woodward has more credibility. >> we are going to continue our coverage, special coverage of the confirmation hearings of bread kavanaugh after a quick break. that we will get back underway, as you see the chairman.

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♪ >> bret: that means the confirmation hearing is back underway. senator chuck grassley from iowa is the chairman of the senate judiciary committee, and he is

dabbling it back into order. let's listen. >> i think it's odd that we don't have criticism of people that are saying the same thing about the supreme court. i want to read to, whenever the president criticizes the judiciary or judicial decisions, we hear wails of english for my democratic colleagues. they attacked the president for threatening the independence and integrity of the judiciary, and the applaud the judiciary for standing up to the president. i just listened to some of my colleagues here. one of them spent 18 minutes attacking the personal integrity of justices of the supreme court. he said that five justices have been bought and sold by private interests. he accused them of deciding cases to the benefit of favored parties. i think it's pretty clear, a double standard, and we

shouldn't have to tolerate such double standards. particularly, from a press that is the policeman of our whole democratic process. without a free press, our government would be less than what it is. it seems to me that something that i hope some of you will take into consideration. you probably won't, but at least i said my piece. then, also, several senators have brought up about the 6% and the 99% and things like that, that i thought i ought to clear up. i could say myself, when i first started finding out how much paper judge kavanaugh had on his record -- i mean, for his background -- i started talking

about 100 million pages. then, when we finally got 488,000, then i could say "well, i got about 48% of what we ought to have." but there's a good explanation of why we don't have it. i want to read. some of my colleagues keep saying that we only have 6% of judge kavanaugh's white house records. 99% of justice kagan's records were made public before the hearing. this is fuzzy math. my colleagues calibrate their phony 6% figure on the two and accurate numbers. first, the 6% figure counts the estimated page count by career archivists at the national archives based upon their historical practice before the on-process emails and attachments are actually reviewed.

when judge kavanaugh's white house emails that we have received, the actual number of pages ended up being significantly less than the number at the archives estimated before the actual review. one reason is because we are able to use technology to call out to the duplicate emails instead of having to read 13 times an email that judge kavanaugh sent to 12 white house colleagues, we only had to redo the email once. second, the 6% figure counts millions and millions of pages of irrelevant staff secretary documents that we never, ever requested or needed. more importantly, we received 100% of the documents we requested from judge kavanaugh's time as an executive branch lawyer. while we may have received 99% of justice kagan's white house records, we have received zero

records from her most relevant legal service as a solicitor general. the federal government's top supreme court advocate. we received much less then 99% of her records as a lawyer. and we didn't receive 60,000 emails from justice kagan, so 99% is an over-estimate. even though we never received them, justice kagan 'a solicitor general records were much more needed at the time because kagan was a blank slate as a judge. unlike judge kavanaugh, with his 12 years of judicial service and over 10,000 pages of judicial writings on the nation's most important federal circuit court. justice kagan had zero years of judicial service, and zero pages of judicial writings before her

appointment to the highest court. senator klobuchar? >> thank you, mr. chairman. before i begin my opening statement, i just wanted to respond to a few things. one, none of that takes away from the fact that 42,000 documents were dumped on us last night. i don't think anyone would go to trial and allow a child to go forward, or allow a case to go forward, if once i got 42,000 documents the night before and the other side -- you can't simply review them, as pointed out by senator whitehouse, you have to review 7,000 documents every hour. that happened last night. >> let me respond without taking time away from you. >> thank you. >> democrats got exactly the same amount of money we did to do the work, the maximum amount of work, that we had to do. we got it done at 11:00 last night. >> the point is that no one could prepare and review 42,000

documents in one evening. we know that. no matter how much coffee you drink. the second point is, it's true that executive privilege has never been invoked before to block the release of presidential records to the senate during a confirmation hearing. i will begin my opening statement, but those are two points i don't believe are refuted. >> well, i will refute it from this standpoint. there were 5,000 documents, 42,000 pages received. >> okay. thank you. welcome, judge kavanaugh. we welcome your family, as well. on the face, this may look like a normal confirmation hearing. it has all the trappings, all of us up here, all of the cameras out there, the statements, the questions -- all of it looks normal. but this is not a normal confirmation hearing. first, as we have debated this

morning, we are being asked to give advice and consent when the administration has not consented to give us over 100,000 documents, all of which detail a critical part of the judge's career. the time he spent in the white house. and, in addition, the majority party has not consented to make 189,000 of the documents we do have public. as a former prosecutor, i know that no lawyer goes to court without reviewing the evidence and record. i know, and i know you know, judge kavanaugh, that a good judge would not decide a case with only 70% of the key documents. a good judge would not allow a case to move forward if one side dropped to 42,000 pages of documents on the other side the night before the case started. and yes, that is where we are today.

this isn't normal. it's an edification of the role of the senate and a disservice to the american people. it is our duty to speak out. secondly, this nomination comes before us at a time when we are witnessing seismic shifts in our democracy. foundational elements of our government, including the rule of law, have been challenged and undermined. today, our democracy faces threats that we never would have believed would be occurring not long ago. our intelligence agencies agree that a foreign adversary attempted to interfere in our most recent election, and it is happening again. in the words of the president's director of national intelligence, "the lights are blinking red." there is an extensive ongoing investigation by a special counsel. the president 's private lawyer and campaign chairman have been

found guilty of multiple federal crimes. the man appointed as special counsel in this investigation, a man who has served with distinction under presidents from both parties, has been under siege. the dedicated public servant who worked in our justice department, including the attorney general and the fbi, have been subjected to repeated threats and have had their work politicized and their motives questioned. in fact, just this past weekend, federal law enforcement was called out, was rebuked, by the president of the united states for simply doing their jobs. for prosecuting two white-colored defendants. one for insider trading, one for campaign theft. why? because the defendants were personal friends and campaign supporters of the president of the united states.

as a former prosecutor, as someone who has seen federal law enforcement do their jobs, this is abhorrent to me. so, no this is not normal. the courts ended to and indivil justices have been under assault. not just by a solitary litigant, but by the president of the united states. our democracy is on trial. the pillars of our democracy and our constitution to weather the storm, our nation's highest court must serve as a ballast in these turbulent time times. our very institutions, and those nominated to protect these institutions, must be fair, impartial, and unwavering in their commitment to truth and justice. so, today we will begin a hearing in which it is our duty

to carry on the american constitutional tradition that john adams stood up for many centuries ago. that is to be, in his words, a government of law and not men. to me, that means figuring out what your views are, judge, on whether a president is above the law. it is a simple concept we learned in grade school, but no one is above the law. i think it is a good place to start. there were many highly-credentialed nominees like yourself that could have been sitting before us today. to my colleagues, what concerns me is during this critical juncture in history, the president has handpicked a nominee to the court with the most expensive view of presidential power possible. a nominee who has actually written that the president, on his own, can declare laws unconstitutional. of course, we are very pleased

when a judge submits an article to the university of minnesota log review, and even more so when that article receives so much national attention. but the article you wrote that i am referring to, judge, raises many troubling questions. should a sitting president it really never be subject to an investigation? should a sitting president never be questioned by a special counsel? should a president to really be given total authority to remove a special counsel? in addition to the article, there are other pieces of this puzzle which demonstrated that the nominee before us has an incredibly broad view of the president's executive power. judge kavanaugh, you wrote, for example, that the president can disregard a law passed by congress if he deems it to be unconstitutional, even if a court has upheld it. what would that mean when it comes to laws protecting the

special counsel was to mark what would that mean when it comes to women's health care mr. mark the days of the divine rights of kings ended with the magna carta in 1215, and centuries later in the wake of the american revolution? a check on the executive was a major foundation of the united states constitution. it was james madison, who may not have had a musical named after him but was a top scholar of his time, who wrote in federalist 47 "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hand, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." so, what does that morning mean in real-life terms today? here is one example. it means, whether people like kelly gregory, an air force veteran, mother, and business owner who is here from

tennessee, and he was living with stage iv breast cancer, can afford medical treatment. at a time when the administration is arguing that protections to ensure people with pre-existing conditions cannot be kicked off their health insurance are unconstitutional, we cannot and should not confirm a justice who believes the president's views alone carry the day. one opening i plan to ask about -- when judges appointed by presidents of both parties joined in upholding the consumer financial protection bureau, you, judge, dissented. your dissent concluded that the bureau, an agency which has served us well in bringing back over $12 billion to consumers for fraud from credit cards to loans to mortgages, was unconstitutional. or, in another case, you wrote a dissent against the rules that protect net neutrality. rules that help all citizens and small businesses have an even playing field when it comes to

accessing the internet. another example that seems mired in legalese's antitrust law. the conservative majority on the supreme court has made it higher and harder and harder. consolidation, and market dominance. yet, two of the major antitrust opinions suggest he would push the court even further down this pro-merger path. we should have more competition, and not less. to go from my specific concerns and end on a higher plane, all the attacks on the rule of law in our justice system over the past year have made me -- and i would guess some of my other colleagues on this committee -- pause and think many times about why i decided to come to the senate and get on this committee. and much further back, why i

even decided to go into law in the first place. i will tell you that not many girls in my high school class dreamed of being a lawyer. we had no lawyers in my family, and my parents were the first and their families to go to college. somehow, my dad convinced me to spend a morning sitting in a court room watching a state court district judge angela a routine calendar criminal cases. the judge handed out misdemeanor sentences. it was certainly nothing glamorous like the work for the job you have been nominated, but it is important just the same. i realized that morning that behind every single case there was a story, and there was a person, no matter how small. each and every decision the judge made that day affected that person's life. i noticed how often he had to make good decisions and had to take account of what his decision would mean for that person and his or her family.

this week i remembered that day, and i remembered i had written an essay about it at the ripe old age of 17. i went back and looked at what i had said. it is something that i still believe today, and that is that, to be part of an imperfect system, to have a chance to better that system, was and is a cause worth fighting for. a job worth doing. our government is far from perfect, judge. nor is our legal system. but we are at a crossroads in our nation's history where we must make a choice. are we going to dedicate ourselves to improving our democracy, improving our justice system, or not? the question we are being asked to address in this hearing, among others, is whether this judge at this time in our history will administer the law with equal justice as it applies to all citizens, regardless of if they live in a poor neighborhood or a rich neighborhood, or if they live in a small house or the white hous

white house. our country needs a supreme court justice who will better our legal system. a justice that will serve as a check and balance on the other branches of government. who will stand up for the rule of law without consideration, politics, or partisanship. who will uphold our constitution without fear or favor, and who will work for the betterment of the great american experiment in democracy. that is what this hearing is about. thank you. >> senator? >> thank you, mr. chairman. we need to get a judge kavanaugh, but i want to risk with a knee for a while. senator klobuchar, you did madison, lin manuel miranda, the magna carta, well done. i had all that on my bingo card. i have little kids, and i have taken my little girls to court a few times, too. mostly to juvenile hall to scare them straight. >> who said that wasn't what my dad was doing?

>> there is wisdom in minnesota. congratulations, judge, on the nomination. congratulations and condolences, this process has to stink. i'm glad your daughters could get out of the room, and i hope they still get the free day from school. let's do some good news/bad news. the bad news first. judge, since your nomination in july, you have been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. if you been declared an "existential threat to our nation." alumni of io law school, incensed that faculty members they were alma mater praised her selection, ready public letter to the school saying "people will die of brett kavanaugh is confirmed." this drivel is patently i have a fair though my fear we will hear more of it. they make and people don't believe in it. the stuff isn't about brett

kavanaugh. when screamer say the stuff or cable tv news. the people who know you better, they tell a completely different story but who brett kavanaugh is. you have earned high praise from the many lawyers, both right and left, who have appeared before you during your 12 years on the d.c. circuit. those who have had you as a professor at yale law and harvard law. people in legal circles invariably applied to her mind, your work at, your congeniality. that's who you are. a supreme court attorney from the left has known you from a decade, "sometimes a superstar is just a superstar, and that's the case for this judge. the senate should confirm them." it's pretty obvious to most people going about their work today that the deranged comments actually don't have anything to do with you. we should figure out, why do you talk like this about supreme court nominations now? there is a bunch that's atypical in the last 19, 20 months in america. senator klobuchar is right, the comments from the white house

yesterday about trying to politicize the department of justice, they were wrong and they should be condemned. my guess is that brett kavanaugh would condemn them. but, really, the reason these hearings don't work is not because of donald trump. it's not because of anything the last 20 months. these confirmation hearings haven't worked for 31 years in america. people are going to pretend that americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven't been screaming protesters thing women are going to die at every hearing for decades. this has been happening since barb stomach robert. this is a 32 year tradition, there's nothing new in the last eight months. the fact that hysteria has nothing to do with you means we should ask "what's that hysteria coming from? "that hysteria around the confirmation hearings is coming from the fact that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the supreme court in american life now. arc of political about the supreme court like they are people wearing red and blue jerseys. that's a really dangerous thing, and, by the way, if they have red and blue jerseys, i would

welcome my colleagues to introduce the legislation that ends lifetime tenure for the judiciary. because if they are just politicians, then the people should have power and they shouldn't have lifetime appointments. so, until you introduce that legislation, i don't believe you really want to the supreme court to be a politicized body. though, that's the way we we talk about it now. we can and we should do better than this. it is predictable that every confirmation hearing now is going to be overblown, politicized, and a circus. it's because we have accepted a new theory about how our three branches of government should work, and in particular how the judiciary should work. what supreme court confirmations should be about as an opportunity to go back and do schoolhouse rock civics for our kids. we should be talking about how a bill becomes a law, with the job of article two is, and with a drop of article three is. so, let's try it just a little bit. how did we get here, and how can we fix it? i want to make four brief points. number one -- in our system, the legislative branch is supposed to be the center of our

politics. number two -- it's not. why not? because for the last century, and increasing by the decade, more legislative authority is delegated by the executive branch of year. both parties do it. the legislature is impotent, the legislature is weak, and most people want their jobs more than they really want to do legislative work. so they punch most of the work to the next branch. third consequence is that this transfer of power means the people you're in for a place where politics can actually be done. when we don't do a lot of big actual clinical debating here, we transfer it to the supreme court. that's why the supreme court is increasingly a substitute political battleground in america. it is not healthy, but it is what happened and it's something that our founders wouldn't be able to make any sense of. fourth, and finally, we badly need to restore the proper duties and the balance of power from our constitutional system. so, .1 -- the legislative branch is supposed to be the locus of

our politics, properly understood. since we are here in this room today, because this is a supreme court confirmation hearing, we are tempted to start with article three. but really we need article three is a part of the constitution that sets a fiduciary. we really should be starting with article one, which is us. what is the legislature's job? the constitution's drafters began with the legislature. these are equal branches, but article one comes first for a reason, and that's because policymaking is supposed to be done in the body that makes laws. that means that this is supposed to be the institution dedicated to political fights. if we see lots and lots of protests in front of the supreme court, that's a pretty good litton's test barometer of the fact that our republic isn't healthy. because people shouldn't be thinking protesting in front supreme court, they should be protesting in front of this body. the legislature is designed to be controversial, noisy, sometimes even rowdy because making laws means we have to hash out the reality that we don't all agree.

government is about power. government isn't just another word for things we do together. the reason we have limited government in america is because we believe in freedom. we believe in the souls, we believe in persuasion, we believe in love. those things aren't done by power. but the government acts by power, and since the government acts by power, we should be reticent to use power. it means when you differ about power, you have to have a debate. this institution is supposed to be dedicated to debate and should be for based on the premise since we don't all agree we should try to constrain that power a little bit. then we should fight about it and have a vote in front of the american people, and then what happens? the people get to decide whether they want to hire us or fire us. they don't have to hire us again. this body is the political branch where policymaking fights should happen. if we are the easiest people to fire, it means the only way the people can maintain power in our system is if almost all of the

politicized decisions happen here, not in article two or article three. that brings us to a second point. how do we get to a place where the legislature decided to give away its power? we have been doing it for a long time. over the course of last century, but especially since the 1930s and then ramping up since the 1960s, a whole lot of the responsibility in this body has been kicked to a bunch of alphabet soup bureaucracy. all of the acronyms that people know about the government, or don't know about the government, are the places where most actual policymaking kind of anyway while making is happening now. this is not with schoolhouse rock says. there is no verse of schoolhouse rock that says "give a whole bunch of power to the alphabet soup agencies and let them decide what the government's decision should be for the people," because people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. we mostly do is decide to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy

x, y, or z to make a law-like regulations. that's mostly what we do here. we go home and we pretend we make laws. no we don't. we write giant places... piece of legislation filled with all these terms that are undefined, and we say "the secretary of such and such shall promulgate rules to do the rest of our dang jobs." that's why there are so many fights about the executive branch, and about the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. the house is even worse. >> i don't really believe that, just seemed like you needed to unite us in some way. i admit there are rational argument is that one could make for the new system. the congress can't manage all the nitty-gritty details of everything about modern governments. this system tries to give power and control to experts in their fields where most of us in congress don't know much of anything about technical matters, for sure, that you could also impugn our wisdom if you want. when you're talking about

technical, complicated matters, it's true that the congress would have a hard time sorting out every final.and to total about every detail. but the review reason at the end of the day that this institution punches most of his power to the agencies is it's a convenient way for legislatures to have to avoid taking responsibility for controversial and often unpopular decisions. if people want to be reelected over and over again -- and that's your highest goal, if your biggest thought is about your own incumbency, giving away your power is a pretty good strategy. it's not a very good life, but it's a pretty good strategy for incumbency. at the end of the day, a lot of the power and delegation that happens from its branches because the congress has decided to self-new to her. guess what? the important thing isn't whether or not the congress has lame jobs. the important thing is, when the congress neuter z self power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, it means they're cut out of the process. there is nobody in nebraska.

there's nobody in minnesota or delaware who elected the deputy at the u.s. ca. if the deputy assistant administrator plant quarantine does something to make nebraskans 'lives really difficult, which happens to farmers and ranchers and lynn brasa, who do they put us to? where do they go? how do they navigate the complexity and the second of all the lobbyists in this town to do executive agency lobbying? they can't. what happens is, they don't have an ability to speak out and fire people through an election. ultimately, when the congress is neutered, when the administration grows, when there's a fourth branch of government, and makes it harder and harder for the concerns of citizens to be represented and articulated by people that the people know they have power ove over. all the power right now happens offstage, and that leaves a lot of people wondering who's looking out for me? that leads us to the third point. the supreme court becomes our substitute political

battleground. it's only nine people. you can know them, you can demonize them, you can try and make them messiahs, but ultimately -- because people can't navigate their way through the bureaucracy -- they turn to the supreme court looking for politics. knowing that our elected officials no longer care enough to do the hard work of reasoning through the places where we differ, and deciding to shroud our power at times, it means that we look for nine justices to be super legislators. we look for nine justices to try and right the wrongs from other places in the process. when people talk about wanting to have empathy from their justices, this is where they are talking about. they're talking about trying to make the justices do something that the congress refuses to do, as it constantly abdicates its responsibility. the hyperventilating that we see this process, and the wave today's hearing started with 90 minutes of theatrics that are preplanned with certain members of the other side here, it shows us a system that is wildly out of whack. thus, a fourth and final point

to -- the solution here is not to try and find judges who will be policymakers. the solution is not to try and turn the supreme court into an election battle for tv. the solution is to restore a proper constitutional order with the balance of powers. we need schoolhouse rock back. we need a congress that rights laws and then stands before the people and suffers the conch doughnut consequences and gets to go back to our own mount vernon if that's what they decide. we need an executive branch that is a humble view of its job as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the congress' absence. we need a judiciary that tries to apply written laws to facts and cases that are actually before it. this is the elegant and fair process that the founders created. it is the process where the people who are elected, 2 and 6 years and this admits region, 4 in the executive branch, can be fired. because the justices and the judges, the men and women who serve america's people by wearing black robes, they are insulated from politics.

this is what we talk about an independent judiciary. this is why they wear robes. this is why we shouldn't talk about republican and democratic judges and justices. this is why we say "justice is blind." this is why we give judges lifetime tenure. this is why this is the last job interview brett kavanaugh will ever have. because he is going to a job where he's not supposed to be a super legislator. the question before us today is not what does he think 11 years go on some policy matter, the question is whether or not he has the temperament and the character to take his policy views and his political preferences and put them in a box marked "irrelevant" and set it aside every morning when he puts on the black robe. the question is, does he have the character and temperament to do that? if you don't think he does, vote no. but if you think he does, stop the charades. at the end of the day, i think all of us know that brett kavanaugh understands his job isn't to rewrite laws as he wishes they were. he understands that he's not being interviewed to be super legislator.

he understands that his job isn't to seek popularity. his job is to be fair and dispassionate. it is not to exercise empathy. it is to follow written law. contrary to the onion-like smears that we see outside, judge kavanaugh doesn't hate women and children. judge kavanaugh doesn't lust after dirty water and stinky air. no, looking at his record, it seems to me that what he actually dislikes our legislatures done i could legislators that are too lazy and risk-averse to do actual jobs. if you read his 300 plus opinions, what his opinions revealed to me as a dissatisfaction -- i think you would argue a constitutionally i've been compelled to satisfaction -- with hungry bureaucrats doing our job when we failed to do it. in this view, i think he is aligned with the founders. for our constitution places power not in the hands of this city's bureaucracy, which can't be fired, but our constitution places the policymaking power in the 535 of our hands because the voters can hire and fire us.

if the voters are going to retain their power, they need a legislature that is responsive to politics, not a judiciary that is responsive to politics. it seems to me that judge kavanaugh is ready to do his job. the question for us is whether we are ready to do our >> the example i always accused her back up what senator sasse says about congress not doing their job and delegating too much is the obamacare legislation that was 27 pages and there were 1,693 delegations of authority to bureaucrats to write regulations, because congress t know how to reorganize health care. >> thank you mr. chairman, welcome judge kavanaugh, welcome to you and your family and friends who are here. we went to the same law school, we clerked in the same house. i've known you and your reputation for 30 years, and i know well that you have a reputation as a good friend,

good classmates, good roommate. that you contributed to your community. i think we will hear later today that you have been a great youth basketball coach. but frankly, we are not here to consider u.s. president of our neighborhood civic association or to review whether you have been a great two youth basketball coach. we are here to consider you for a lifetime appointment to the united states supreme court where you will shape the future of the country and have an impact on the lives of millions of americans for decades to come. and to make that decision to exercise our constitutional role, we have to look closely at your decisions, your statements, your writings to understand how you might interpret our constitution. the next justice will play a pivotal role in defining a wide range of critical issues including the scope of the president's power and determining whether the president might be above the law. the next justice will impact the central rights enshrined in our modern understanding of the constitution including the right to privacy.

rights to contraception, intimacy, abortion, marriage. the freedom to worship as we choose. the ability to participate in our democracy, full citizens in the promise of equal protection. that's because the cases that come before the court are not academic or a satiric or theoretical, they involve real people and reburial -- real and lasting consequences. i deeply regret the process that has gotten us to this point the excess and partisan gamesmanship of the last few years and that history bears briefly repeating. when justice scalia passed in february 2016 i called the white house and urge them president obama to nominate a jurist who could gain support from both sides of the aisle and build a center of the court. annie did just that when he nominated the d.c. circuit judge, who i know that you admire. by my republican colleagues refused to meet with or hold a hearing or vote on his confirmation. during the 400 days that the

majority refused to fill the vacant scene, president trump gave a nominee -- a list of nominees to the heritage foundation. and after the president was elected, he picked from that list and nominated neil gorsuch to the supreme court. when he testified before the very committee he told us repeatedly how deeply he understood in respective president, he even recited a book that he coauthored with you. but in the first 15 months of service, neil gorsuch has overruled five important supreme court precedents and to question many others. to name one, given it was just labor day, just as gorsuch guided public sector unions, overturning a 41 year precedent to where there were great reliance interest in impacting millions of workers across the country. my point is that justice gorsuch was confirmed to the court in one of the most concerning the artisan processes in senate history.

and only after the majority of deployed the nuclear option to avoid the filibuster for supreme court nominations. this brings us, judge, two today and your nomination. when justice kennedy announced his retirement i called the white house and urge through counsel that president from consider selecting someone for the seat who could win broad support from both sides of the aisle. and judge kavanaugh, i am concerned that you may not be that nominee. your record prior to joining the bench places you in the midst of some of the most pitched and partisan battles in our lifetimes from ken starr's investigation of clinton into the 2,000 election recounted to the controversies of the bush administration including server lands, torture, access to justice and the culture war. so it is critical that this committee and the american people fully examine your record to understand what kind of justice you would be. and unfortunately, as we have all discussed at length here today, that has been rendered

impossible. the majority has blocked access to have millions of pages of documents for your service as a critical role in the white house prayed for the first time since watergate, the nonpartisan archives have been crossed out for producing your records. senate republicans have worked to keep committee confidential nearly 200,000 pages of documents so that the public cannot view them and we cannot question based on them. and your form your deputy is in charge of designating which documents to this committee and the american people get to see. not only that, but for the first time in that history, the president has evoked executive privilege to hold 100,000 pages of documents on a supreme court nominee from the judiciary committee. this leads to a difficult but important question, what might a president term for the majority be trying to hide? mr. chairman, i want to make an appeal to work together to restore the integrity of this committee. we are better than this process. we are better than proceeding

with a nominee without engaging a full and a transparent process, this committee is failing the american people by proceeding this way and i fully support the motions made by my colleagues earlier in this hearing and regret that we proceeded without observing the rules of this committee. that said, judge kavanaugh, i have reviewed the parts of your record that i have been able to access. and what i have been able to see from available speeches, writings, and decisions. and i have to say that it troubles me. while serving on the bench you have just ended at a higher rate than any circuit judge elevated to the supreme court since 1980. that includes judge bork. revealing some views and positions that fall well outside the mainstream of legal thought. you suggested as has been referenced at the president has the authority to refuse to enforce a law such as the affordable care act, if he were to decide it was unconstitutional. you voted to strike down net neutrality, gun safety laws, the consumer financial protection

bureau and many would undercut environmental protections or workers rights or antidiscrimination laws. and you have recently appraised justice rehnquist dissent. you have embraced an approach the subsequent due process. it would undermine the rights and protections of millions of americans from basic approach for lgbt americans, access to contraception, and the ability for americans to love and marry whom they wish. i am concerned that your writings demonstrate a hostility to affirmative action and civil rights. and most importantly, i believe that you have repeatedly and enthusiastically embraced and interpretation of presidential power so expansive it could result in the dangerously unaccountable president at the very time when we are most in need of checks and balances. i want to pause for a moment on this last point, because the context of your nomination troubles me the most. in reviewing your records, judge, you have question the lawfulness of the united states

decision where the unanimous court said that the president had to comply with the grand jury subpoena. you have questioned a 30-year-old old precedent saying that congress can create an independent counsel with the authority to investigate the president and the president cannot just fire on a whim. you have question whether the president and his age should be subject to any criminal investigations while in office. and given these positions about presidential power which i view as being at one extreme of the record of circuit judges, we have to confront an uncomfortable question about whether president trump may have selected you, judge kavanaugh, with an eye towards protecting himself. so judge kavanaugh, i'm going to ask you about these issues as i did when we met in my office. and i expect you to address them. we spoke, you agree that we have a shared concern about the legitimacy of the supreme court that it is critical to our

system of rule of law. in my view, it is today in jeopardy. you participate in a process that is featured unprecedented concealment and partisanship around your record. and a few moments ago, senator durbin proposed a bold step which would be for you to support suspending this hearing until all of your records are produced and available to this committee and the american people good and i encourage you to do this. also both parties who have not stated how they will vote on your nomination, and i urge you to answer our questions about your prior work, your writings, precedent, and the constitution itself. to trust the american people and to help build our trust in the court on which you well may serve. i've been to too many hearings in which judicial nominees have told us that they will evenhandedly apply the text of laws or the constitution only to watch them ascend to the bench and whittle away individual rights of americans or overturn long settled processes.

the supreme court vacancy comes at a critical time for the country. when our institutions and the law and the democracy are being tested. if we are going to safeguard the rule of law, our courts and in particular our supreme court must be a bulwark against unprecedented violations of law, depredations of freedom and abuses of power by anyone, including our president. no one said it better than our former colleague, senator mccain, who once asked about america, what makes us exceptional? is that our wealth, our military, our power, our big country, no, it is our founding ideals and our fidelity to them. and our conduct in the world. they are the source of our wealth and power. that we live under the rule of law. that enables us to face threats with confidence that our values make a stronger. judge kavanaugh, we are here to determine whether you would uphold or undermine those

founding ideals and the rule of law. we are here to determine whether you would continue in the traditions of the court or transform it into a body more conservative than a majority of americans. we are here to determine whether your confirmation would compromise or undermine the legitimacy of the court itself. i urge you to answer our questions and confront the significant challenges. these are weighty questions. and the american people deserve real answers. thank you. and i look forward to your testimony. >> you can easily get the impression not just from senator coons, but other senators that somehow you, judge kavanaugh, are out of the mainstream in some way. so i looked at your record in the d.c. circuit and have found that judges have agreed with you and your rulings in an overwhelming majority of matters across the board, 94% of the

matters, judge kavanaugh heard were decided unanimously. and 97% of the matters judge kavanaugh heard he voted with the majority. judge kavanaugh issued dissenting opinions and only 2.7 tenths percent of the matters that you heard. i would also like to clarify what the presidential records act requires. our documents process has fully complied with the presidential records act under the federal statute of president bush, he has the right to request his own administration records period he also has the authority to review his records before the senate receives them. indeed, the archives may not produce them to the committee

without giving president bush and his statutory representatives and opportunity to review first. this is what president bush has done in the national archives and we do not have the authority to second-guess president bush's decision to release records to us. the national archives was not cut out of the process. as president bush represented the committee "because we have sought received and follow, that means the archivist's viewd as personal documents, the resulting productions of documents to the committee is essentially the same as if the archivist had conducted its review first and then sought our views and the current administration views as required by law." senator flake. >> thank you mr. turman. congratulations, judge

kavanaugh, and congratulations to your family as well. limit just say, few things about the issue that has been discussed here a lot today, the issue of documents and document production, the standard that we use to look at nominees is what is relevant and probative. i would suggest that we certainly get that from the 12 years that you have served on the circuit court. on the d.c. circuit court that considers when you look at the docket items that more than any circuit court that the supreme court's would be perhaps called to rule on. in the past, senators on this panel have argued on both sides of the aisle that's confirming a judge, confirming a judge the best that we could look at is his or her judicial record.

you have that record. and it is a long one. over 300 opinions. and i would suggest that that is where we need to start. a lot of the other records that have been discussed are mainly duplicative, administrative documents. many do not meet the standard of relevant or probative they may not demonstrate that type of justice that you will be. senator sasse talked about what we are called to do is to look at your temperament, your judgment. your character. and i think that you can see a lot of that by the type of life that you have lived outside of the courtroom when we met in my office i was impressed obviously with your respect for the law and quick intellect, but also struck by kindness and decency. i found out that we share a deep love of sports. we both played football back in the day.

i'm sure that you are looking forward to this weekend, not just when these hearings are concluded, but when the redskins and cardinals play on sunday. i learned that you run the boston marathon twice i wonder if the ava took that into account when they gave you favorable rain. i'm not sure what that says about the soundness of mind, myself. but in all seriousness, training for a marathon and completing two is a huge accomplishment. it demonstrates not just your competitive spirit, but a strong sense of purpose and commitment. and it says something about your temperament and character. of course, no greater commitment than to your family, your wife ashley, your two daughters. i know that you beam with pride when talking about them. in talking about as has been mentioned earlier, coaching her daughter's elementary school

basketball teams. i have a letter for the record written by a group of parents whose girls played for basketball teams that judge kavanaugh and coaches. and with mr. chairman, without objection, i would like to enter that letter into the record. the team's parents noted that judge kavanaugh has been a devoted coach and a mentor to their daughters. as these parents note, coach k, that is new, not the duke, the famous one, stresses the importance of the team and has given the girls opportunity to learn about teamwork, humility, respect, discipline, hardware, and competitiveness. again, going back to temperament and character. judge kavanaugh has dedication and commitment as a volunteer basketball coach i think demonstrates and says a good deal about that character. and congratulations to you and a blessed sacrament bulldogs for

winning the city championship this year. i know that you must be proud of your team. aside from running marathons, winning basketball championships, you spent as i mentioned in the last 12 years as a federal appeals court to judge on the d.c. circuit. you have earned a reputation of legal commentators and colleagues on both sides of the aisle of a solid, careful judge. thorough and clear writer, and someone who promotes collegiality on the court, working with people across ideological lines. i have also a "new york times" article for the record written by professor amara, a self-professed liberal who describes judge kavanaugh as one who appreciates the craft of judging was seriousness and commands wide and deep amongst scholars, jurors, and across th. i would like to submit that as well. as i mentioned, judge kavanaugh

has distinguished and astonishing record, writing more than 300 opinions joining his colleagues and issuing thousands of additional cases, and that is where we need to look first when we are looking at how you will judge on the supreme court. now, i know that it was brought up today a lot of the concern on the other side of the aisle stems from the concern of the administration that does not seem to understand and appreciate separation of powers and the rule of law. i have that concern as well. if you just look at what was said just yesterday by the president, i think it is very concerning. he said in a tweet two very popular republican congressmen were brought to a well-publicized charge just

ahead of the midterms by the jeff sessions justice department, he calls it. two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time, good job, jeff." that is why a lot of people are concerned about this administration and why they want to ensure that our institutions hold. thus far they have, gratefully. jeff sessions has resisted. pressure from the president to punish the enemies and relieve pressure on his friends. and many of the questions that you will get on the other side of the aisle and from me will be how you view that relationship. where you believe article one powers and end article two powers of the administration begin. so i expect to have a number of questions on that subject.

i again appreciate your willingness to put yourself through this process. and i look forward to the hearing moving ahead in the next week. thank you, mr. chairman. >> indeed. senator blumenthal. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. chairman for your conducting the hearing as fairly and patiently as you have. and i am going to be remarking further on what procedurally i think is appropriate here, but i want to begin by thinking judge kavanaugh and her family for your commitment to public service. i want to thank the many, many americans who are paying attention to this hearing. not only in this room, but also across the country. i want to thank them for their interest and indeed their

passion that is what sustains democracy. that commitment to ordinary everyday americans participating and engaging in this process. there is a t-shirt worn by a number of folks walking around this building that says "i am what's at stake." this vote and to this proceeding could not be more consequential in light of what is at stake. whether women can decide when they want to have children, and become pregnant. whether the people of america can decide whom they would like to marry. whether we drink clean water and breathe clean air. whether consumers are protected against

defective product and abuses and whether we have a real system of checks and balances or alternatively an imperial presidency. i will not cast a vote to more important than this one. and i suspect few of my colleagues will as well. and what is at stake is indeed the rule of law. my colleague senator flake quoted the president's tweet yesterday. i'm going to repeat it. "two long-running obama era investigations of two very popular republican congressmen were brought to a well-publicized charge just ahead of the midterms by the jeff sessions justice departmen department. two easy wins now in doubt, because there is not enough time. good job, jeff."

i've had my disagreements with this department of justice. i want to note, for the record, that at least one high-ranking member of the department of justice was in this room, and i want to urge the justice department to stand strong and hold fast. against this onslaught which threatens the basic principles of our democracy. and i want to join my colleague, senator sasse and his hope that to you, judge kavanaugh would condemn this attack on the rule of law. and our judiciary, because at the end of this dark era when the history of the time is written, i believe that the heroes will be our independent judiciary and our free press.

you are nominated by that very president who has launched this attack on our department of justice on the rule of law and on law enforcement like the fbi. law enforcement at every level whose integrity he has question. and to your response to our questions will be highly enlightening about whether you join us in defending the judiciary and the rule of law. that very president has nominated you in this unprecedented time. unprecedented, because he is an unindicted coconspirator who has nominated a potential justice,

who will cast the swing vote on issues relating to his possible criminal culpability. in fact, whether he is required to obey a subpoena. to appear before a grand jury. whether he is required to testify in a prosecution of his friends or associates or other officials in his administration, and whether, in fact, he is able to stand trial while he is indicted during his time as president of the united states. there is a basic principle of our constitution, and it was articulated by the founders. no one can select a judge in his own case. that's what the president is potentially doing here. selecting a justice on the supreme court to potentially will cast a decisive vote in his

own case. that is a reason why this proceeding is so consequential. senator sasse urged us to do our job. i agree. part of our job is to review the record of the nominee as thoroughly and deliberately as possible. looking to all of the relevant and probative evidence. we cannot do that on this recor record. mr. chairman, you have said multiple times that your staff has already reviewed the 42,000 pages of documents produced to this committee at 5:41:00 p.m. yesterday. both sides are using the same computer platform. to review the documents from

mr. burke, the documents had to be loaded into the platform overnight. and could not be concluded until 6:45 a.m. this morning pit how is it possible that your staff concluded its review last night before the documents were even uploaded? that is a platform that both sides are using here. simply not possible. mr. chairman, that anybody has seen these new materials, much less all of the other relevant documents that have been screened by bill burke who is not the national archivist, and this situation when we say it is unprecedented is truly without parallel in our history and i will quote from the national archivist, it is "something that has never happened before."

and the archivist continued the efforts by former president bush does not represent the nationale george w. bush presidential library. "so, mr. chairman, i remove my notion to adjourn so that we have time to conclude our view of these documents and so that also my request under the freedom of information act, which is now pending to the national archivist, to the department of justice, two other relevant agencies can be considered and judged, that freedom of information act will require some time, i assume to conclude. i remove my notion, mr. chairman and ask for a vote on the motion to adjourn as i've said earlier,

rule four provides "the committee chairman shall, not to make, shall entertain a nondebatable motion to bring a matter before the committee to a vote." that seems pretty clear to me, mr. chairman, i have made a notion to bring before the committee a motion to adjourn under the rules, with all due respect, you are required to entertain my motion. and i would just add this final point, all of these documents will come out. they will come out eventually. as soonest 2019 and 2020. by law, these documents belong to the american people. they do not belong to president bush or president trump. they belong to the american people. it is only a matter of time, my

republican colleagues, before you will have to answer for what is in these documents. we do not know what is in them. but the question is, what are they concealing that you will have to answer to before, mr. chairman, i remove my notion to adjourn. speak of those rules are execute business session. we are not an executive business session, so i deny -- >> mr. chairman, with all due respect, i ask you to pointed to me the language in rule four or anywhere else in the rule that limits the scope to executive business meetings. there is no such language, mr. chairman. >> i would add language to the contrary. >> can you call me that language? >> no, i'm saying can you quote me language to the contrary of what i rule.

>> there is nothing that precludes the vote in our hearing add to this exact time. >> i rule, do you want to proceed, do you? >> well, if the chair, with all due respect rolling against me, i appealed the ruling of the chair, with all due respect. the chairman is not above the rules of the committee. i asked for a roll call vote to remove the chair and to allow for a vote on my motion to adjourn this proceeding. >> that would be in an appropriate -- an appropriate motion if we were in a business session, but we are not in executive business session, so it is denied. >> mr. chairman, i will proceed under protest. we have had a lot of rhetoric so far about rules and norms. i am very regretful that the chair has adopted the stance, which in my view contradicts our

basic norms and rules. but i will proceed. mr. chairman, i have fears about what this nominee will do with respect to our rule of law, but also about the basic rights that have been established by past supreme court precedent. and the only way to test what fidelity to the rule of law is, in fact, is to ask as i have asked every judicial nominee coming before me when i have served on this committee and hearing, whether he believes past decisions of the supreme court work correctly decided. so i will be asking you, judge kavanaugh, if you believe that

to roe v west correctly decided. >> mr. chairman, may i ask a question? i was under the impression that each of us had 10 minutes for an opening statement. 50 minutes for questions. >> let me clarify. >> and mr. chairman, various members have been making speeches all day long and have not been confined to their ten minute opening statement. >> okay, well, like i told you -- >> i think i have time left. >> you will have time. i'm going to let you finish, just a minute. i was hoping that the ten minute rule would stand. but we got off to a very bad start. and we got off to a bad start, and everybody started exceeding the time limit, so i guess as long as we have -- we have to stay here and get this all done today, if we have to stay into the night, we are going to stay,

but i'm not going to cut anybody off now that i have not done it right away. and like you said, mob rule, i've always said to myself when advising other people, either you run the committee or the committee runs you. and i let the committee run me this time. so, let's just proceed as we have and to let senator blumenthal take what time he wants. i hope that he will not go too long. >> i will be very judicious, mr. chairman. >> i don't know what that means. >> he is not answering. >> i am sorry senator corner, and i cannot agree with you. we will just proceed. next time. >> so i will be asking judge kavanaugh whether you believe roe v. wade west correctly decided, whether you believe brown versus board of education was correctly decided. judicial nominees have found all kinds of ways to avoid answering that question. first they said they felt it

would violate the canons of ethics. they are no canons of ethics that remove a response. then they said that they felt a decision might come before them, and issue in a case that might arise. and more recently, they have adopted the mantra that they think all supreme court decisions are correctly decided. but you are in a different position. you have been nominated to the highest court in the land, and your decisions as a potential swing vote could overturn even well-settled precedent. and there are indications in your writings. your opinions, as well as the articles that you have written as in some of the memos that have come to light that you believe, for example, roe v. wade could be overturned. and that is why you want to know from you whether you think it

was correctly decided in the first place, and other decisions that are regarded as well settled, or long-established. in fact, i have these fears because, judge kavanaugh, the system and process has changed so radically. in fact, you have spent decades showing us in many ways what you believe. or to put it more precisely, you have spent decades showing those groups like the federal society and the heritage foundation what you believe. they are the ones who have really nominated you. because the president outsourced this decision to them. and to those opinions and writings and statements and

interviews, you have done everything in your power to show those far rights groups that you will be a little -- loyal soldn the court. i'm going to use some of those writings in the timing and other indications to show that you are more than a nominee, in fact, a candidate in a campaign that you have conducted. that seems to be, unfortunately, the way that that system has worked. the norms have been dumbed down. and to the system been degraded. but i think that we have an obligation to do our job and elicit from you where you go as a justice on the united states supreme court. based on what you have written

and said and also what you will tell the american people in these hearings. i join in the request that has been made a few that you showed the initiative and asked for postponement on these hearings. i think this process has been a grave disservice to you. as well as the committee and the american people. if you are confirmed after this truncated and concealed process, there will always be a taint, and asterisk after your name. appointed by a president, named as an unindicted coconspirator after the vast amount of documents relating to the most

instructive period of his life were concealed, the question will always be why was all that material concealed. you have coached and you have meant toward judges in going through this process. you are as sophisticated and knowledgeable as anybody who will ever come before us as a judicial nominee, so you know that we have an obligation to inquire as to everything that can be relevant. and it is not the numbers of documents. it is the percentage. there were no emails when justice ginsburg was the nomine nominee. the documents that we have been provided contain duplicates, they are full of junk. we need everything that is relevant including the three years that you served in the bush white house as staff

secretary. the most instructive period of your professional career. so, let me just conclude by saying, what we share, i think is a deep respect and reverence for the united states supreme court. i was a law clerk, as you were. i have argued cases before the court. most of my life has been spent in the courtroom. as u.s. attorney or as attorney general. the power of the supreme court depends not only on armies or police force, it has none, but on its credibility. the trust and confidence of the american people. i ask you to help us uphold that trust by asking this committee to suspend this hearing and come back when we have a full

picture, with the full sunlight that our chairman is so fond of espousing. so that we can fully and and evaluate your nomination. thank you, mr. chairman. >> once again i will remind everybody that we have a half a million documents on this gentleman's record, and also i would like to respond to the fact that you can't go 42,000 pages, which i guess is way over the number of documents that we actually received. the majority and minority receive documents in two ways. one is a format that can be uploaded to reviewing platforms, and the second is a standard document file format called pdfs. given the importance of reviewing documents in a timely

matter, my staff reviewed the pdf version. the production was relatively small, and therefore there was no need to upload them to reviewing. senator kennedy, euronext. you are next, senator kennedy [crowd shouting] >> thank you mr. chairman. i have listened with interest today. i agree so much with what senator sasse said. i have lesson today, and it is no wonder to me that so many americans think that the united states supreme court is nothing more than a little

congress. a political body like the united states senate. let me try to explain what i am looking for in the supreme court justice. i want a judge. i don't want a politician. i am not naive. it is true, senator booker and i are new to the senate. we did not come here when moses walked the earth. but we are not new to politics. and i understand that human relations are about to politics. get that. but i do not think that our founders ever intended for the united states supreme court to become a political body. i don't. i am not looking for an ideologue. i'm not looking for a hater.

what i am looking for is somebody who is smart and who is intellectually curious, who writes cleanly and crispy, who knows what a semi : colon is f, and who understands that every piece of law accounts. let me discuss why i agree so much on what senator sasse said. this is not a news flash, our is divided. we have been divided before. we will be divided again. we will survive this, but i confess the division in our country today is, seems to me to

be especially sharp. and what concerns me so much is the basis for it. it is not a disagreement, so much of it is anger. there have been thousands, millions of pages written about the genesis of that anger. we all have opinions. you know what they say about opinions. here's mine. i think a big part of the anger in america today is because we have too many americans who aren't sharing in the great wealth of this country. not economically, not socially, not culturally, and not spiritually. and to those americans believe that the american dream has

become the american game. and that that game is fixed. let me give you one example why you say that. i don't hear it so much today. i am biased, but i think that the tax cuts and jobs bill act worked. but when i ran two years ago, i would hear it every single day. people would stop me and they would say, kennedy, you know what is wrong with this economically? they would tell me, i look around, kennedy, and i see too many undeserving people. i emphasize undeserving, i do not want to paint too broad a brush. they would tell me, kennedy, i look around and i see too many unobservant people at the top getting bailouts. and i see too many undeserving people at the bottom getting handouts. and i am here just a working smoke in the middle. stuck in the middle, and my

health insurance has gone up, and my kids tuition has gone up, and my taxes have gone up. but i tell you what has not, my income. i happen to think we are doing better in that regard, but we still have to work a long way to go. but here's the point, who is supposed to fix that for the american people? it is us. it is the united states congres congress. it is not the united states supreme court that is supposed to fix this country culturally, economically, socially, spiritually. and that's why i agree so much of what senator sasse said. it's almost become cliche, but the role of a judge is or at least should be to say what the law is, not what the law ought to be.

and that has become cliche. but cliches are cliches, because they are true. judges are not put there to try to bypass the ballot. courts should not try to fix problems that are within the province of the united states congress. even if the united states congress does not have problems not meant to decide these kind of issues. i'm not too naive, i know that judges are not robots. we can't replace you and should not try to replace you with a software program based on artificial intelligence. you have discretion. we are going to talk about that, if we ever get to the questioning part of this exercise. but i want to say it again, i understand why, listening today, and so many americans believe that the law -- which i think

all of us riviere has become politics just pursued in another way. it is not the way that it is supposed to be, judge. that is not what i am looking for. i am going to end, i still have plenty of time left, i think i have two hours allotted, mr. chairman? somebody talked about, they had seen this movie before, this thing is as long as a movie. these are the words of justice curtis "in 1857, when he descended in the dred scott cas case, "when a strict interpretation of the constitution according to the fixed rules that govern the interpretation of laws is abandoned, and to the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no

longer a constitution." we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean." that is not the rule of law. justice scalia put it another way, and i will truly end with that. he said, "the american people love democracy. and the american people are not fools. the people know their value judgments are quite as good as those taught in any law school. maybe better. value judgments, after all, should be voted on, not dictate dictated. "that's what i am looking for, judge. thank you, mr. chairman.

>> senator kennedy from louisiana with his opening statement as this confirmation hearing continues. >> and it goes on and on, and we still have senators graham, senator carano, amol harris coming up, we will take a quick break and be back with more.

>> martha: we are back, senator carano of hawaii is one who did not want at the hearing to happen at all, but now taking part. >> bret: we will have complete coverage and a wrap up as we hear the nominee, brett kavanaugh. >> over the last year and a half, these are the women and men appointed by republican and democratic presidents who ordered the government to to reunite parents with third children ripped from their arms

at the border, who rejected attempts to deny federal funds to cities, refusing to be drawn into the war against immigrants. who stopped executive orders aimed at me capping sector unions. to stop the implementation of an ugly ban on transgender americans serving in the military. who ruled that officials cannot block citizens from their twitter feed. and who stopped at the government from banning muslims from entering the united states, these judges stood firm in the american values that express a system of checks and balances it enshrines. at this moment of our democracies, it is these judges and others like them who have pushed back against the efforts of a president eager to wield unlimited and unchecked power. in normal times, we would be here to determine the day of a fitness of a nominee to the supreme court of the united states, chosen for his or

her legal talents and reputation of fairness. but these are not normal times. instead, we are here to decide whether or not to rubber-stamp a donald trump's choice of a preselected political ideologue, nominated precisely because he believes a sitting president should be shielded from civil losses, criminal investigation and prosecution, no matter the facts. let's not forget, during the campaign, donald trump needed to sure up his republican base who questioned whether he was sufficiently conservative. returning to the society and the heritage foundation to build a preapproved list of names and promised to pick from among them was selecting nominees for the supreme court. these groups are long-standing right-wing organizations that advocate for conservative causes and legal positions. they heritage foundation focuses on evoking policy among other things, opposing climate change,

refusing the affordable care act and reducing relations for big businesses -- changing the legal session to align with an ultraconservative interpretation of the constitution including the overturning of roe v. wade. when given the opportunity to nominate a new supreme justice, donald trump did exactly as he promised that he did not select someone who demonstrates independence and fidelity to the rule of law. instead, donald trump selected a preapproved name in order to guarantee a fifth vote for his dangerous anti-worker, anticonsumer, antiwoman, pro-corporate, and anti-environmental agenda. in donald trump selected brett kavanaugh from this list for a specific reason, the president is trying as hard as he can to protect himself from the independent, impartial, and dogged investigation of his abuse of power before though

walls close in on him entirely. because if there is one thing that we know about donald trump, it is that he is committed to self-preservation every minute, every hour, every day. judge kavanaugh's appointment should be considered in a broader context. the president has been attacking our porch with ideological judges that come to the bench with firm positions and clear agendas, who then go on to rule in ways consistent with those agendas. for example, trump nominee james gould, now a judge on the fifth circuit has written in favor of unlimited campaign contributions and in another case, publicly aired his personal views in opposition to abortion. trump nominee don willet, now a judge on the fifth circuit has already voted to curtail the independence of a federal agency that helped rescue the economy after the mortgage crisis of 2008. trump nominee stephen devos, now a judge in the third circui

circuit, he does not believe title ix requires school districts to require transgender facilities and bathrooms. amy kony barrett, now a judge on the seventh circuit, willing to keep out of court employees trying to challenge an arbitration proceeding and casting the deciding vote to allow business to continue to segregate its workforce. and trump nominee john k busch, now a judge on the sixth circuit, willing to keep out of court a woman accusing her employer of age discrimination, despite a dissenting judge's view that there was sufficient evidence to go forward. when these trump nominated judges came before this judiciary committee has nominees, my democratic colleagues and i try to find out how they would go about deciding tough cases, what they would base their decisions on when the law did not give a clear enough direction, as is often the case. and time and again, we were

told, don't worry about my personal background or my history as a partisan political advocate. do not worry about what i have done, written, or said until now. when i get on the bench, i will just follow the law. but clearly, they have not. why should we expect the supreme court to nominee, you, to be any different? president trump selected brett kavanaugh because of his fealty to the president partisan movement he has been a part of his entire professional life. from his clerkship with judge alex kaczynski to his apprenticeship with ken starr, to his work on george w. bush's legal team during the florida recount and in the white house, judge kavanaugh has been knee-deep in partisan politics. the first reward for that service was his nominee to the d.c. circuit. it was a tough fight, but republican aligned peschel interest fought for more than three years to get him

confirmed. and for the past four years as a judge he has rolled into scent or majority in line with the political and ideological agenda. now president trump has selected judge kavanaugh to provide the physical in cases that would change some of the most basic assumptions that americans have about their lives and their government. there are more than 730 federal judges working on thousands of cases across the country every day. most of these cases and in trial courts. to some of are appeals and heard in a appellate court. the closely divided supreme court hears very few cases. many times fewer than 100 every year. before justice kennedy retired so many important constitutional rights were hanging in the balance, decided on narrow grounds by five or four votes. and now that justice kennedy has left the court, the forces opposed of workers rights, women's rights, lgbtq rights,

voting rights, civic rights of all kinds, and environmental protections are eager to secure a solid majority on the court to support their right-wing views. these right-wing forces have been working for decades to prepare for this moment, because they know that a single vote, a single vote for one justice is all it would take to radically change the direction of this country. it could take just one vote on the supreme court to overturn roe v. wade and deny women control over the reproductive rights. it could take just one vote to declare the acas pre-existing protections unconstitutional. it could take just one vote to dismantle environmental protections that keep our air safe to and our water claim to drink. it could take just one vote to dismantle common sense gun safety laws that keep our communities safe. and it could take just one vote to further erode protections for working people and unions. since this nomination was

announced, i've been asked many times why the democrats would even bother to go through the motions, when we know that our republican colleagues will do anything to support this administration's judicial nominees. there are battles worth fighting, regardless of the outcome. a lifetime appointment to the supreme court of someone who provides a fifth vote on issues impacting the lives of every working american is a battle worth fighting. so i use this hearing to urge the american people precisely why who sits on the supreme court matters. why if it's a diligent ugly conservative and -- conservative for the country, why you reject the president's latest attempt to rig the system in his favor. as senator is being asked questions in the coming days, i ask the american people to listen carefully to what the nominee says and compare it to what we have heard only a short time ago from neil gorsuch at his confirmation hearing. just 18 months ago judge gorsuch

told us "all precedent on the supreme court deserves precedent, the anger of the law." judge gorsuch said, it "it is not if i agree or disagree with any precedent, that would be an act of hubris, because an act of precedent, once it decided carries far more weight than what i personally think was quote. he said, making these promises when asking for a vote, but he joined a majority of the court to overturn precedent in a 41-year-old case that protected government workers and their ability to form a union in a 5-4 decision. i expect judge kavanaugh to make similar promises over the next few days, only to do, sadly, the exact opposite of confirmed. our job here is important, because every american should be concerned with what our government and country would look like if judge kavanaugh is

confirmed. we owe it to the american people and to all of the independent minded judges, i mentioned at the beginning of my remarks to conserve the integrity of the constitution and fairness of a system that has served us well for so long. judge kavanaugh, what may be going through your mind right now is to simply and stoically endured this hearing, but don't you think that you owe it to the american people to disclose all of those documents being requested? because you have nothing to hide. because you have nothing to hid hide. i agree with my colleague senator durbin, judge kavanaugh, if you stand behind your full record in public life, fundamental fairness would dictate that you join us in our call for this committee to suspend until we receive all relevant documents and have a chance to review them. your failure to do so would reflect a fundamental distrust of the american people.

thank you, mr. chairman. and i would like to have entered into the record the op-ed piece that are referred to by john podesta and todd stern. >> without objection, it will be entered. let's go to senator crapo's next. >> thank you, mr. chairman. judge kavanaugh, welcome. thank you for your service to this country and the willingness that you have expressed to take the additional assignment. and thank you to your family. we welcome them as well. the process on the process is one of the most important duties entrusted to the senate. advice and consent on judicial nominations. ultimately a fair and proper judge, supreme court or otherwise, must follow the law and not make laws from the bench. upon receiving his nomination to serve as an associate justice of the supreme court, judge kavanaugh stated my judicial

philosophy is straightforward. a just must interpret statutes as written and interpret the constitution as written informed by history and tradition and precedent. isn't that the ideal of a judge steadfastly committed to the law? no one questions judge kavanaugh's qualifications to serve as an associate justice on our highest court. he is vastly experienced and widely respected for his intellect, honesty and his legal acumen. with over 300 opinions and 12 years on the bench, he's a judge with a clear record demonstrating he applies the law as written and enforces the constitution. he values precedent and has written along with justice gorsuch and others the law of precedent. sadly, much of the discourse

against the nomination deals not with the content of his legal opinions, his judicial philosophy or temperament, but rather as today's discussions have shown the notion that our distinguished chairman has not been rigorous or fair or transparent in navigating the requisite document production efforts required by this committee. those claims are wholly would foundation. there's been 57 days since the announcement of judge kavanaugh's nomination on july 9 and today's confirmation hearing. this is a longer period of time than senators had for justices sotomayor, kagan and gorsuch. justice kavanaugh also submitted over 17,000 pages with his bipartisan judiciary committee questionnaire. the most extensive questionnaire ever returned by a nominee to

the security. the committee also received more than 440,000 pages of documents related to his service in the executive branch. this too is more than any supreme court nominee to date. as has been said earlier, in fact it's more than the last five nominees combined, i applaud chairman grassley and his staff for their tireless work in reviewing these documents and making the vast majority publicly available as quickly as possible. frankly, mr. chairman, i believe the american people appreciate your efforts, your transparency and your commitment to a fair process. now, i want to make one side note. it was said here today that the number of documents provided by justice kagan, who was also a nominee that served in the white house and had many documents

related to her service, that 99% of the documents requested for her were provided. one problem with that fact. and that is that when justice kagan came before us, there were more pages relative to her service than your service. we don't know the number because the republicans agreed after a strong disagreement with the democrats that we wouldn't request those documents because the white house claimed they were sensitive. the democrats have not made that agreement with the republicans this time. but it's notable, incredibly important to note that this argument that is going on today about the balance of document production is simple a trumped up argument. these facts aside, many colleagues continue to criticize this process. their motives are clear, use any

means available to attempt to delay the confirmation process of a well qualified jurist fit for the job indefinitely. i strongly agree with the comments of many of my colleagues here today. senator cruz pointed out what was really at stake. senator sass said why it is that congress needs to be the part of our federal government that makes the law, not the judiciary. senator kennedy followed up on that and many of my other colleagues here today. i think one point that senator cruz made deserves repeating. much of what we're hearing today and the remainder of this process is ultimately an effort to relitigate the last presidential election. in fact, we have just heard judge kavanaugh attacked and stated to be unqualified because he is a trump nominee.

other trump nominees have been attacked here today. the attack is on president trump. not on their nominees. because of an unwillingness to accept the outcome of the last presidential election. judge kavanaugh as the nominee has been widely recognized for his judicial temperament and his detailed legal writings in defense of the constitution. his opinions are widely cited by his fellow appellate judges and even the supreme court. although his integrity was just challenged, stating that no matter what he says to this committee that he will vote the other way once put into office, put in the supreme court. the fact is that his record as the chairman has already outlined disproves that. he serves on the d.c. circuit court of appeals. a court on which more of the judges who serve have been

appointed by democrat presidents than republican presidents. yet he's voted 97% of the time with his colleagues in the majority on that court. showing that he will follow the law and that he does so with the majority support of broad and -- i was going to say bipartisan but nonpartisan judges who are appointed by republican and democrat presidents and consider some of the most important cases in america today. that is the judge before us. he's a judge's judge. many critics argue that justice kavanaugh would play an instrumental role in reversing a number of supreme court precedents. however, i wonder how one can draw that conclusion given his record of exhaustive and weighty consideration of important legal questions on a court such as the d.c. circuit. i recognize that it is politics

driving these attacks. so do the american people. they know what is at stake here. moreover, in his legal opinions, judge kavanaugh has demonstrated a willingness to reign in both congress and the executive branch when they overstep their respected constitutional grounds. judge kavanaugh understands and is focused on the principle that a judge is a servant of the law, not the maker of it. we should take him at his own words. the judge's job is to interpret the law, not to make the law or policy. so read the words of the statute as written. read the text of the constitution as written. mindful of history and tradition. don't make up new constitutional rights that are not in the text of the constitution. don't shy away from enforcing constitutional rights that are in the text of the constitution.

those are just kavanaugh's words. that is the man who sits before us. nominated to be a justice on the highest court of our land. judge kavanaugh has the backing of his former law clerks and law students, his colleagues on the bench appointed by both republican and democrat presidents and many members of his local community in which he's remains so closely involved. he's a man of honor, integrity and well-respected in the legal community. there's no dispute he's qualified to serve on our nation's highest court. mr. chairman, i look forward to hearing from the nominee himself when we get done with our statements. the next few days will prove inciteful as we discuss with judge kavanaugh for the public to hear in his own words the proper role of a judge in our constitutional system. i look forward to this hearing and again, judge kavanaugh,

thank you for being willing to be here. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you. senator booker. >> thank you, mr. chairman. welcome, judge kavanaugh. i want to say welcome to your family sincerely as well. we're all americans and taking part in what is truly a historic moment. mr. chairman, chairman grassley, i hope you don't think earlier this morning that in any way i was questioning your integrity or decency. i was appealing to it earlier before. you've been conducting this hearing giving myself and others the opportunity to at least speak and make our case. even though you have not ruled in our favor, of which i'm disappointed, i value your friendship and frankly some of the most valuable moments i have on the state. i remember coming to agreement with you on criminal justice reform. i have a deep respect for you. >> if you worry about our friendship being affected, it will not be. that gives me an opportunity to say something to the public at

large. that is about this committee. you would think that republicans and democrats don't talk to each other. i'd like to remind the public that when they think that happens, they ought to think of the record of this committee, not just this chairman, but this committee and the 3 1/2 years and maybe even before i got to be chairman. in the 3 1/2 years i've been chairman, every bill that got out of this committee has been a bipartisan bill. proceed, senator. >> thank you very much, sir. i appreciate that. it doesn't detract from the fact that i just fundamentally disagree with the way you've been concluding today. when i first got to the senate, i was very fortunate that a lot of senior statesman, yourself, senator hatch included gave me hard wisdom at times. i came to the senate in a special election at a time that we were changing some of the senate rules. senator levin brought me aside and gave me a hard talking to. senator mccain gave me a hard talking to.

all of them made similar points about this idea that sometimes you need to be as objective as possible and see how you would react if the pendulum was swung the other way. in other words, they warned me that what goes around in this place comes around. to really think that if the shoe was on the other foot. i've been struggling with that, sir, with all honesty of what would the republicans be saying, what we would be saying if we had a democratic president right now, a democratic nominee right now and this process was in the reverse. and i would like to believe how i would behave and i'm confident -- i'd be a betting man, be willing to bet that if the republicans were being denied effectively 90% of the documents about a person's public record, and i do believe that some of the analogies made to senator -- to justice kagan and her solicitor general time is not a fair analogy. this is a part of the nominee's history that he himself has said

was one of his most formative times. so i would not hire an intern in my office knowing only 90% of their resume. there's not a person here that would buy a home only seeing 10% of the rooms. i just believe what we're doing here just on the objective view of fairness is sincerely unfair and it's insulting to the ideals that we try to achieve with some sense of calmity and some sense of rules. i want to go deeper than that. i'm trying to figure out what the jeopardy would be, what the jeopardy would be if we just waited for the documents. last night we had a document dump of tens of thousands of pages. tens of thousands of pages. it's been said there's no judge that would allow a court proceeding to go on, no judge that would move forward if one of the parties had just got

documents as of 5:00 p.m. or potentially 11:00. what i don't understand is what is the jeopardy of just waiting? not just for us to digest these documents but other documents. the reality is, senator grassley, you yourself have asked for specific more finite set, more limited set of documents that you haven't even gotten. so whether it's not seeing 90% of the resume of the gentleman before us or 50% or 40%, that should come within time. there's no jeopardy when we have a lifetime appointment. he will be there should he be confirmed for decades and decades and decades. waiting another week or five days or two weeks for those documents that you yourself have requested, which is a more limited subset for those documents to come through, i don't understand what the rush is especially given all that is at stake. is a those are the reasons why i say to you with sincere respect,

this is an absurd process. it seems unfair to me and could easily be solved by us putting a pause here in this process, waiting for the documents, evaluating the documents and it will be a much more robust set of hearings on this nominee. as i said, i would not hire an intern if i had -- if i only saw 10% of their resume. here to have a fuller body of the work of this gentleman before us, who is popping up in some of the more interesting times in the last decade or two on the most important issues, already the limited amount, what we call 7% of the documents that i have seen, unfortunately those are things being held committee confidential, which i don't know if i can use in my questioning here. the question is being ousted from the senate. but even a little bit of documents have potentially made my questioning far more rich, far more substantive to get to

the heart of the issues of the individual nominee. again, sir, i try to summon the spirit of some of the elder states people i had the privilege of serving with from rockefeller to levin to mccain to summon that spirit to be as objective as possible. i don't think it's unreasonable for us to wait for a week or two to get the full body of those documents. it will cause no harm or damage except to have more of a full telling of what is at stake here. this is -- the stakes are too high in what the nominee represents for us to rush through this process without a full sharing of the documents. with that i'll continue, sir, with my opening statement. i have said before already th that -- >> i'll take this opportunity to probably say that you said i didn't get all of the documents i requested. you probably heard the first

sentence of something that i said after our break. that was that i could -- i first started talking about expecting a million documents. we end up i think with 488,000. then i went on to explain the process with the software and everything else that can speed things up, duplicates were eliminated and et cetera, et cetera. so we've gotten all the documents i requested. just to correct you. >> sir, to my understanding -- >> go ahead with your opening statement. >> i want to make a point to that if you don't mind. you requested a limited set of documents in his time as a white house counsel's office. we have not received his documents. they're being vetted slowly through the system of a -- not a representative from the committee but the bill burke individual that is still reading through the documents as we speak. i imagine some of them will be dumped on us as the process is

going on. i say some of them might be trickling out in the days before the full senate vote. please, sir. >> you're talking about committee confidential. you have access to them right now. there hasn't been a determination that like 80% of all of the documents are on the website so the public can see them, but in regard to some, they were forwarded to us without a second review. that second review gives an opportunity to then get them out to the public. if there's no reason that they are excluded under the law and you can read those committee confidential documents right now. >> sir, we sent a letter asking for that. i'll resend it before the hearing tomorrow. >> we responded to your letter. >> again, sir, you did not respond to our letter by

allowing committee -- >> please go to your opening statement. >> thanks very much, sir. look, i was, you know, former senator, now former vice president biden talked about not questioning your colleagues motives and the colleagues across the aisles called this a sham a charade. i can go through a lot of the words used calling into question the motivations that i have or doing what i believe, sir, is perhaps the most grave and important duty that i have as a senator to advise and consent. yes, as senator cornyn pointed out, i have announced my decision already but my duty to the people of the state of new jersey and others have to fully vet an individual. that's why the documents are important. the full record is made clear and we have a chance to ask questions about it. i also have said that i oppose this nomination happening right now because of the moment we're in american history, which is

very unprecedented. we've had bipartisan statements by senators working in tangent about the attack on the united states of america, which was an attack going to the core of what our democracy is about. the voting processes. a special counsel was put into place. that has led to dozens of people being indicted, people all about the president of the united states. it has led to dozens and dozens of charges and that investigation is ongoing. we've seen the president of the united states credibly accuse by his own personal lawyer as being an unindicted co-conspirator. all of this, we have a judge chosen that was not on the original list. i wasn't on the outsourced federal society's list. he wasn't on the second version of that list. he got on to the list after this special investigation got going. in other words, after the

president was? jeopardy. he was added to the list and the president pulled the one person from all of that list late -- that was added late that would give him in a sense the ability to pick a judge that has already spoken vastly about a president's ability to be prosecuted, about a president's ability to dismiss or end an investigation. so that's the second reason why i have asked for us to put a pause on this process. fundamental to this nation's very beliefs. judge hamm said this. our founding documents, they're not worth much if the people themselves lose faith in them. i believe the nomination of a judge for all of this list so powerfully speaks to a president's de facto immunity from ongoing investigation

prosecution will shake the faith that millions and millions of americans can have in the fairness of the system. i asked the judge time and time again to recuse himself, to restore that faith, to alleviate the concerns of americans, and he has thus far refused to do so. now, i'm upset about the process. this is not manufactured outrage. this is sincere concern for a process that seems wrong and just not objective and fair. i'm concerned about as my colleagues are on both sides of the aisle, a russian attack on our nation. there's a lot more going on here that makes this nomination a great concern. it's frankly some of the things i've heard from both sides of the aisle. when we travel this country and what we're hearing from individuals and how that relates to a position on the supreme court. right now millions of american

families are watching in sincere concern and fear. i've heard them. i've gotten the calls. i talked to republicans and democrats. they're fearful about where the supreme court is going and what it will do when it has the power to shape law, shape the lives and liberties for decades to come. i've talked to workers all over my state, all over this nation. workers that now work in a country where wages are at a 60-year low as a portion of our gdp, whose labor protections are being diluted and whose use unions are under attack. so many individuals are asking whether the supreme court of their lifetime will be an institution that elevates the dignity of american workers or one that allows powerful corporate interests to continue to weaken labor protections that didn't just happen. labor protections that were fought for. you know the labor movement died for these labor rights going to

become aggravated, limited, further increasing the vast disparities of wealth and power in our country. we know this. we talked to them, both sides of the aisle. we talked to cancer survivors, parents with beautiful children that happen to have disabilities, that because of the affordable care acted can no longer be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition is. there's a texas case where that is being challenged right now. that could likely go before the supreme court. knowing your record, it's right that these americans, so many of them with pre-existing conditions are asking whether the supreme court will be an institution that affirms and protects the rights of people with access to healthcare. many people that rightfully believe when they read our

founding documents talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. they believe that healthcare is fundamental. we know what corporations are doing with drugs. people go off to see the doctor because a visit is too expensive. that is in the balance of this nomination. i've gone across the state. senator durbin, was in your state talking to a republican farmer about how the farm country is changing so dramatically the livelihoods of so many independent family farmers are being threatened by the consolidation of large multinational corporations. these corporations have acquired so much power. the seeds that they buy, the prices going up. the abuse of corporate consolidation is driving so many farmers out of business.

you see one farmer was telling me about the suicide rates. now people are saying that this is histrionics. it's not life or death. i know these things actually are often a matter of life or death when an insurance rate goes up. more people without healthcare lose their lives. there's not one senator on the republican side or democratic side that has not seen -- i've been here five years and i've seen the culture of washington change because of the obscene amount of dark money pouring into our political process, corrupting our political process, rigging the system. this nomination will have an effect on that. i've seen americans all over this country with bipartisan work they've done that feel entrapped by a broken justice

system. it targets black and brown americans. many americans believe in one famous american that said that it treats you better if you're rich, guilty and poor and innocent. these issues are in the balance now. the people that worry about these issues wonder what the story of america is. we have this great leader, a man named king that said the arc of the morale universe bends towards justice. so many americans fought for these fundamental rights, family members, union organizers, civil rights activists that fought for, struggled for and died for many of these rights. the right to an abortion and not a back alley butcher. the right of all americans to marry who they love. the right to vote. and to work free of discrimination regardless of race and the rights of all

americans. these are our rights, american rights. so we know the answer to these questions. see the pattern of your decisions. that's the pattern that troubles me, judge. i know we're going to get a chance to come through this. my colleagues will as well. it seems so clear in your court, the same folks seem to win over and over again. the powerful, the privileged, big corporations, special interests. over and over again. folks lose. the folks why i came to washington to fight, working folks, consumers, women, minorities the disadvantaged, the poor. this is the challenge before us. this is why so much is at stake. i love that my colleagues keep going back to the constitution,

but understand this. i laud our founders. i think they were geniuses but you have to understand that there's millions of americans that understand that they were also flawed people. we're the oldest constitutional democracy. we're the oldest one. we were founded in a break with human events. you know this, judge. i read your writings. we were not founded on a tribalism as much as we think it's breaking out. we weren't founded because we look alike, pray alike, we're the same race. we broke with the course of human events and formed this nation. god bless america, god bless our founders. we know our founders and their ideals. we know that they were flawed and you can see that in the documents. native americans were referred to as savages. african americans, blacks, slaves were referred to as fractions of human beings. as one civil rights activists --

>> senator booker -- >> i'm almost done. >> the only reason i stopped you at this point is i thought that i would let people go at least as far as senator blumenthal went and you reached that point. >> i appreciate that. i'm a bit of a trail blazer. i'm going to push two or three more minutes. >> my point sir, i'm proud of this history. >> your clock when it reaches 10 is your 2 1/2 minutes. >> i want to point out right here, from selma, seneca falls, there's an activism that i worry, rights that were gained were rolled back. the example i have here is there's an amazing activist here right now, miss carlotta lanier. i thank her for coming today. it was 61 on september 4, 1957 that mrs. lanier at the age of

14 faced crowds that were shouting racial slurs. she was jeered. she joined what was called the little rock 9. we now what they did that day was bigger than the first day of school. it was the first major test of the supreme court's landmark decision, the 1954 brown versus board of education decision. i've been shocked sitting here that there's judges that trump appointed that renews to say -- i'm not saying this is you -- that that is settled law. there's people like mrs. lanier part of gaining rights in this country, advancing the ideals of this nation by the founders despite the imperfections. now the fear and the worry is that with the trend of the court is rolling back those gains. undermining that progress. restricting individual rights. the rise of corporations, the

rise of dark money, the rise of interests of the powerful and the privileged and the elite. so i say in conclusion, sir, i said this to you in a heart-to-heart moment the last seconds that you came to my office to meet with me one-on-one, which i appreciated. i pointed to the map behind my desk, which is the central ward of new jersey. a mighty people. people still struggling for the promises of america. that's the concern i have right now. that's what's at stake. so i say in conclusion, sir, this to me is a profound and historical moment. i can not support your nomination, not just because of the body of your work, but also the pro verse process by which this comes forward. we should not vote now. we should wait. if we're not waiting, we should object to your nomination. thank you. >> senator tillis. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i have a 12-minute preamble and

18 minutes of comments. [laughter] in all seriousness, to beat senator flake, first off to ashley, i know margaret and liza are gone. you've held up well. to your parents, judge kavanaugh, i have to compliment you on your mother's composure. i'm sure my mother would have been out of the chair by now. i appreciate all that you've done. you've obviously raised your son right i you know, i think we need to go back and recognize. we were going to be here. this wasn't going to be a cou e couple -- cumbaya moment. many of these people knew they were going to vote against you. know we're asking for documents and you're getting them. as a matter of fact, the chair has done an extraordinary job. he started out by offering --

acquiring as many as a million documents. we determined because of duplication it was half a million. they've been provided. i'm not an attorney but i am a technologist and a process person. i know damn well if you get documentation electronically, you can get through it in hours. for the documents that get sent yesterday, you can get through it in hours. they need to run up the score was they know they're going to vote against you. i compliment you on your composure. you took a lot of notes. i'll spend a lot of time listening to your responsing rather than talking over you and simplifying things to yes or no questions. i look forward to your testimony tomorrow. you know, as the hearing was going on, there were two things that caught me during my prepared statements. i'll submit them for the record, mr. chair.

we're talking about this dark money and efforts on the other side. i just got an e-mail organizing for action. that's the legacy campaign of president obama telling me to oppose you because you're going to deny reproductive rights, deny healthcare coverage, advance climate change in a bad way and gun violence prevention. i don't know near as much about the institutions of government as let's say senator sass, but i'm pretty sure once you get confirmed on the bench, you can't file a bill to do that. what you may owned up doing is finding out that we got lazy, we didn't work hard enough, we didn't understand the constitution, we didn't reach across the aisle to create enduring value, which is why people get frustrated with you. they want you to do our job. justice gorsuch said numerous times in his confirmation hearing that i participated in, it's not my job to do your job, mr. senator. if you're frustrated and worried

about the prospects of somebody being denied coverage for a pre-existing condition, let's fix it. that's why i filed a bill a couple weeks ago. let's fix it. don't play politics and blame the supreme court for your inadequate architecture of a bill. let's fix it. if you're worried about strikes that judge kavanaugh called on the bench against regulatory issues, seems to me you called balls and strikes on both sides. there's flaws that need to be fixed. for the attorneys in the room that are studied on the law, rather than try to get judge kavanaugh to commit one way or the other on these policy initiatives that president obama and others around this table are interested in, get them to explain to you the legal theory behind his position that may have in fact produced an outcome that he didn't particularly like, but because he did it

based on its interpretation of the constitution and the laws. don't expect him to be a politician. as for motivations, i have to say that it's been said by at least one person on this committee that on the one hand, we shouldn't question other people's motivations. on the other hand, it find it personally insults because i think we have before us a qualified judge, someone that will call balls and strikes to suggest that because i'm incl e inclined to support him that i'm evil, really makes me question the sincerity about other people's motives. judge kavanaugh, i'm glad you're before us. i believe that you have 300 opinions that people should look at and read and try to spar with you on the basis of your legal knowledge. your constitutional understanding and the statutory construct. it would be great and i hope that people have actually taken time to look at the single most

important factor in your resume. it's not maybe where you went to school. i guess that's good. it's not where you practiced law. it's the 307 different opinions that you can read, the dissent you can read. spar on the basis of your legal knowledge those of you that want to be the smarter later in the room and see if you can prove a better theory that may give judge kavanaugh pause. that's not what this is about. i'm so glad that i'm one of the last people to do an opening statement. what i hope i hear tomorrow -- by the way, just from a process standpoint -- we're going to have 30-minute rounds, which in senate time is about 1 1/2 hours per member tomorrow. then we're going to have 20 minute rounds the following day. everybody take time to talk about legal theory. stop the theater, start talking about what is really meaningful here. i think if we do that, i have every confidence judge kavanaugh you will be justice kavanaugh and i'm proud to actually see

you compose yourself the way you have today. i'll be asking you several questions on some judgments that frankly i didn't like, but i know you probably made the right decision. i believe that when you get confirmed to the bench, you'll actually take some other opinions i don't like because what i wish you could do for me because we fail to get it done here. but it will be done for the right reasons. i think if people objectively look at your record, they'll be hard-pressed to take all of this theater we've heard today and boil it down into something that makes you look like you're an activist judge, just waiting to be one of the members of the nine legislative branch down the street. you're one of the sinkest greater opportunity -- great opportunities that we have to make the supreme court make us do our job and to reign in the dangerously high amount of authorities that our administrative branch has. that's all i want you to do. i look forward to asking you

questions tomorrow. i yield back the rest of my time. >> i see senator graham has rejoined us. he was here before me. more senior. great. so i thank you, mr. chairman. i'd like to restate my objection from earlier for the record, which is my motion to postpone this hearing. a number of comments have been made by my honored and respected colleagues. there was some mention of a concern about alaina kagans hearing. there was an agreement that certain records are sensitive and should not be disclosed. it's my understanding that as a point of distinction between that time and today, those were active cases in the white house. for that reason, there was an understanding and agreement that they were of a sensitive nature and should not be disclosed. in terms of the point that has

been made about playing politics and blaming the supreme court, i think that we have to give pause when those kinds of concerns are expressed to also think about the fact that there's been many political campaign that has basketball run -- been run indicating to use the supreme court to end things like the voting rights act and campaign finance reform, which makes this conversation a legitimate one in terms of a reason concern about whether this nominee has been nominated to fulfill a political agenda. as it relates to using that court and the use of that court. as it relates to the 42,000 pages of documents, i find it interesting that we get those documents less than 24 hours before this hearing is scheduled to begin. but it took 57 days for those

documents to be vetted before we would be given those documents. so there's some suggestion that we should be speed readers and read 42,000 pages of documents in about 15 hours when it took the other side 57 days to review those same documents. so the logic at least on the math is not applying. now, the chairman has requested 10% of the nominee's documents. that's 10% of 100%. the nominee's personal lawyer has only given us 7% of his documents. 7 out of 100% of the full record. republicans have only given 4% of these records or made them public. that's 4% of 100% of a full record. 96% of his record is missing. 96% of his record is missing.

it is reasonable, it is reasonable that we should want to review his entire record. then we can debate among us the relevance of what is in his record to his nomination. it should not be the ability of this -- the leadership of this committee to unilaterally make decisions about what we will and will not see in terms of its admissibility. senator kennedy called this a job interview of the american people. by that standard, the nominee before us is coming to his job interview with more than 90% of his background hidden. i would think that anyone that wanted to sit on the nation's highest court would be proud of their record and would want the

american people to see it i would think that any one privileged to be nominated to the supreme court of the united states would want to be confirmed in a process that is not under a cloud. that respects due process. i would think that anyone nominated to the supreme court of the united states would want to have a hearing that is characterized by transparency and fairness and integrity and not shrouded by uncertainty and suspicion and concealment and doubt. we should not be moving forward with this hearing. the american people deserve better than this. so judge kavanaugh, as most of us know and i will mention to you and you have young children and i know they're very proud of you and i know you're a great

parent and i applaud all that you have done in the community. as you know, as we know, this is a week when most students in our country go back to school. it occurs to me that many years ago right around this time, i was starting kindergarten. i was in a bus, a school bus, on my way to thousand oaks elementary school as part of the second class of students as bussing desegregated in berkeley, california. this was decades after the supreme court ruled brown v. board of education that separation was unequal. i said many teams had chief justice earl warren had not been on the supreme court of the united states, he could not have lead a unanimous decision and the outcome then of that case may have been very different had that decision not come down the way it did, i may not have had

the opportunities that allowed me to become a lawyer or a prosecutor. i likely wouldn't have been elected district attorney of san francisco or the attorney general of california and i most certainly wouldn't be sitting here as a member of the united states senate. so for me a supreme court seat is not only act academic issues of legal precedent or judicial philosophy. it's personal. when we talk about our nation's highest court and the men and women that sit on it, we're talking about the impact that one individual on that court can have. impact on people that you'd never meet and whose names you'll never know. whether a person can exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot may be decided if judge kavanaugh sits on that court. whether a woman with breast cancer can afford healthcare or is forced off life-saving

treatment. whether a gay or trans-gender working treated with dignity or may be treated as a second class citizen. whether a young woman that got pregnant at 15 is forced to give birth or in desperation go to a back alley for an abortion. whether a president of the united states can be held accountable or whether he will be above the law. all of this may come down to judge kavanaugh's vote. that's what's at stake in this nomination. and the stakes are even higher because of the moment we're in and many of us have discussed this. these are unprecedented times. as others have already observed, less than two weeks ago, the president's personal lawyer and campaign chairman were each found guilty or pleaded guilty to eight felonies. the president's personal lawyer

under oath declared that the president directed him to commit a federal crime. yet that same president is racing to appoint to a lifetime position on the highest court in our land a court that very well may decide his legal fate. and yes, that's essentially what concern judge kavanaugh could mean. so it's important, more important i'd say than ever, that the american people have transparency and accountability with this nomination. and that's why it's extremely disturbing that senate republicans have prevented this body and most important the american people from fully reviewing judge kavanaugh's record and have disregarded just about every tradition and practice that i heard so much about before i arrived in this

place. judge kavanaugh, when you and i met in my office, you said with respect to judicial decisions that rushed decisions are often bad decisions. i agree with you. i agree with you. when we're talking about who will sit on the supreme court of the united states, i believe your plank couldn't be more important. mr. chairman, when judge kavanaugh was nominated in july, he expressed his belief that a judge must not make law. in reviewing his background, i'm deeply concerned that what guides him is not independence or impartiality. it's not even ideology. i would suggest it's not even ideology. what i believe guides him and what his record that we've been able to see shows is what guides this nominee is partisanship. this nominee has devoted his

entire career to a conservative republican agenda. helping to spear head a partisan investigation into president clinton, helping george w. bush's legal team ensure that every vote was not counted in bush v. gore. helping to confirm partisan judges and enact partisan laws as part of the bush white house. and in all of these efforts, he's shown that he seeks to win at all costs even if that means pushing the envelope. if we look at his record on the d.c. circuit and in his recent writings and statements, it's clear that the nominee has brought his political bias to the bench. his carried out deeply conservative partisan agendas as part of a judge favoring big business over ordinary americans, polluters over clean air and water and the powerful over the vulnerable. just last year judge kavanaugh praised the dissent in roe v.

wade and ruled against a scared 17-year-old girl seeking to end her pregnancy. he has disregarded the supreme court precedent to argue that undocumented workers weren't really employees under our labor laws. we have witnessed horrific mass shootings to las vegas to jacksonville, florida. judge kavanaugh has gone further than the supreme court and has written that because assault weapons have "in common use", assault weapons in high capacity magazines cannot be banned under the second amendment. when he was part of an independent council investigation into the democratic president, the nominee was dogged in demanding answers. yet he has since changed his tune, arguing that presidents should not be health accountable. a position that i'm sure is not

lost on this president. these positions are not impartial. they're partisan. judge neil gorsuch, judge kavanaugh's classmate insisted before this committee that judges are not politicians in robes. i fear that the judge's position is exactly what he may well be. now i know members of this committee and the nominee's friends and colleagues have assured us his devoted to his family and supported by his law clerk and community. i don't doubt that at all. that's not why we're here. i'd rather that we think about this hearing in the context of the supreme court of the united states and the impact it will have on generations of americans to come and do we want that court to continue a legacy of being above politics and unbiased or are we prepared to

participate in a process that is tainted and that leaves the american public questioning the integrity of this process. i'll close by saying this. we have a system of justice that is symbolized by a statue of a woman holding scales. she wears a blind fold. just it's the wear as blind fold because we have said in the united states of america under our judicial system justice should be blind to a person's status. we have said that in our system of justice, justice should be blind to how much money someone has, to what you look like or who you love, to who your parents are and the language that they speak. and every supreme court justice must understand and uphold that ideal. sir, should those cases become before you, judge kavanaugh, i'm concerned whether you would treat every american equally or

instead show allegiance to the political party and the conservative agenda that has shaped and built your career. i'm concerned your loyalty would be to the president who appointed you and not to the constitution of the united states. these concerns i hope you will answer during the course of this hearing. i believe the american people have a right to have these concerns. i also believe the american public has a right to full and candid answers to the questions and answers presented to you during the course of this hearing. i will be paying very close attention to your testimony and i think you know the american public will be paying very close attention to your testimony. thank you. >> senator graham. >> am i the last person? >> yes. >> but don't forget, we're going to hear from the nominee and his introducers -- >> we're going to jump in for just a moment.

we have heard a lot from kamala harris and senator blumenthal before her. he basically said that he believed the documents that you heard so much about today, the 42,000 documents that democrats claim they didn't get their hands on in time in order to judge this would-be supreme court justice, he said they will come out in time and you will have a lot to answer for. sort of laying the ground work that this will be an issue brought up perhaps even after this supreme court justice is put in place. you can see lindsey graham starting in for his questions now. felt like the question and answer session without answers for a good time here as we watched him get hammered by a number of these senators on issues that we'll hear more about again tomorrow. >> and while we're covering this confirmation hearing, a lot of other numbers happening. senator jon kyl appointed by the arizona governor. rahm emanuel says he won't run for re-election.

we had bob woodward's book drop information. now the white house pushing back hard saying it's all lies. the white house chief of staff said he never called the president and idiot. all of that happening while this is going on. one thing that has taken over on twitter, one picture heading to the lunch break where fred guttenburg killed at the parkland florida hearing tried to shake hands with brett kavanaugh before the lunch break. he didn't shake his hand there. what you don't see is the video here where the security steps in soon after that as they're heading to lunch break. there you can see the security step in. it's a meme on twitter. we thought we would bring it to you. if kavanaugh won't give a handshake, how can we believe he will give gun violence victim as fair shake in court. it's in context there. brit hume, chris wallace and

dana perino as we wrap up our coverage and hand over to neil cavuto. dana, your thoughts and what we've heard. >> we heard a lot of argument about process. when you're arguing about process, you don't have much to stand on. reporters love to talk about process and headlines will result it from. i think that the democrats also showed that they're willing to show that their base they're part of the resistance. they're going to try what they can. it's interesting the democrats never seem to be mad at themselves for a decision made years ago by harry reid, which was to end the filibuster for nominees. that's how they're in this position now where you don't need a 60-vote threshold for a supreme court nominee. i think a lot of this was demagoguery against brett kavanaugh. he's been very patient to sit there and listen to all of it. by the time that you hear brett kavanaugh speak, the contrast will be stark and will turn the tide on this nomination. >> the couple of things, first of all on the video, i have looked at the video of that

moment and at least from what i saw, it was just a moment where this man stands up reaches out to brett kavanaugh. brett kavanaugh he had no idea who the man was. he certainly did not know that he was the father of a student who had been killed in parkland. so the idea that he was snubbing the relative of a parkland victim is just made up. this is a man at -- in a crowd moving forward and the security you can see going up to make sure that brett kavanaugh was -- there were protests throughout the hearing. we have no idea who this person was. the other point i want to make, you heard corey booker say what if this were on the other side? how would the republicans would react? we know how they would react. i looked at confirmation votes. the last four democrats, how many votes they got when they were confirmed, ruth bader ginsberg got 96. breyer 97. sotomayor, 68. kagan, 63. so dramatic numbers of democrats -- republicans voted

with the democrats. the republicans, roberts got 78. alito got 58. and gorsuch got 54. so democrats vote much more party line against republican nominees than republicans vote against democratic nominees. >> i just want to add that, you know, chris' point, this has been a very hostile environment today. you had a number of protesters as you mentioned jumping up in this room. he couldn't see who they were. so then they get up to go to lunch break and someone comes toward him from the right. i think it's a bit unfair to call this a snub when that is all we have to go on and the room has been very testy. >> to dana point, a lot has been about process. senator grassley moving forward as he did, chose to let everybody have their say. and then let it air out. >> yeah, we're about the end of the day where we would be. perhaps that senator grassley hoped. his tactic of being patient with these and letting it play out is

probably turned out to be effective and wise things to do. once you join something like this, it prolongs it. so the republicans by and large did not. i would say that this is a good example. chris touched on it with the votes he mentioned of the fact that republicans supreme court nominee with a handful of nominees have been treated with respect. you can make a case going back before then. it's hardball politics all the way. so when merrick garland was nominated, the republicans turned the table on him and won on that. that is where we are with these supreme court nominations because particularly in the eyes of democrats, so much of what they hoped to accomplish rests on the composition of the court. if they lose there, they feel they lost more than they can ever gain back through legislation. >> thank you. >> the environment -- chris mentioned that was in the prior scenario. where you had to get 60 votes and it was not that difficult in those days. it was almost a courtesy to

approve the person that the president has picked. that's not the environment now. >> that will wrap up our coverage here. neil cavuto will continue the coverage and will have a complete wrap-up. you'll hear from brett kavanaugh the nominee himself live on fox news channel and we'll be back tomorrow for the questioning as this hearing continues. we'll send it back to senator graham who is in the process of his opening statement and from there you'll see neil cavuto and we'll see you tomorrow and special report tonight at 6:00. >> and the story at 7:00. >> i don't believe they see you as a threat to the nation if you come out on the idea that the second amendment has some meaning. in other words, the political process, when it comes to guns is a work in progress. i would rather us decide that the new. when it comes to the pillar of virtue, comey.

that he has been a supporter of comey and led the fight to get him confirmed. he was a principled public service. with the deepest of regret, i now see that i was wrong. the president can fire him for that and not to. >> neil: you're watching lindsey graham continuing the point of judge kavanaugh. among others who will set the stage for finally bret kavanaugh getting a chance to say something on his own after eight hours of doing with all of this. let's go to the hearing. >> you're all for getting rid of this guy. now, all of a sudden, that country is turning upside down because donald trump did. there is a process to find out what happened in the 2016 election. it's called mr. mueller. and now, i will do everything i can to make sure he