Takeaways from Judge Kavanaugh’s Hearing
Over the past week, Judge Brett Kavanaugh faced a series of tough questions from U.S. Senators regarding his Supreme Court nomination and the controversy surrounding it.
Most of the resistance, coming particularly from Democrats, has to do with the lack of information released regarding Kavanaugh’s past.
For reasons unbeknownst to most, an alarming amount of documents have been marked as classified and been made unavailable to Senators and the American people.
Many of the documents that have been made available to the Senators were done so with extremely short notice and in very close proximity to the date of his hearing.
This is not unlike the strategy the GOP has used before to quickly get other legislation passed in a timely manner.
As we have seen before, Democrats have not had enough time to gather the right information to get a proper hold on a given situation and before they know it, the bill has been passed.
When it comes to other situations, like a tax bill, it is an issue, but doesn’t have consequences as severe as giving a lifetime appointment to a judge in the highest court.
Democrats began Kavanaugh’s hearing on Tuesday with an attempt to postpone the vote to a later date, in order to have the proper time to not only review the documents they currently have their hands on, but also to request access to the documents that have mysteriously been made unavailable to them.
Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) did not support this motion and ruled that the Democrats who requested to postpone the vote were out of order.
The rest of the first day consisted of several protests and lots of back and forth between Republicans and Democrats in discourse that was not as civil as many had hoped.
The day came to an end with little common ground and it seemed as if the Democrats were no closer to getting the information about Kavanaugh which they desired.
On Sept. 6, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) opened up by demanding certain documents be released to the public. Documents that had been marked confidential for no apparent reason in the eyes of Booker, titled “Racial Profiling,” seemed like they would be of great interest to anyone reviewing Kavanaugh as a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Even more curious about those documents is the fact that Republicans have made them confidential when there is no matter of national security at hand or serious personal information at risk if the documents were released.
Despite pushback from Republicans, Booker went ahead and put these documents on Twitter for anyone to go ahead and view at their leisure.
Once this is all said and done, it is likely that Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as the next Supreme Court Justice. More than anything, the confirmation of Kavanaugh will be due to the fact that Congress is currently controlled by the GOP with a Republican president in office.
The importance of voting in any election, big or small, cannot be overlooked. In a world where Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, their pleas would mean a whole lot more and would likely end up being the difference between confirming a judge or not.
Although the American people do not get to vote on Supreme Court justices, they elect the people who do.
