Republicans have been doing everything possible to hide the judicial record of Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, from scrutiny. They've sat on literally one million such documents, and only released about 45,000 of them the night before the Senate Judiciary hearings got underway on Tuesday.
When Democrats objected to such nonsense, chair Sen. Chuck Grassley assured the Democrats that his office had reviewed every document, and that it was Democrats who were not doing due diligence.
Cory Booker then went off, daring Grassley to cesure him by releasing these documents himself.
Still, that meant hundreds of thousands of documents were being blocked under executive privilege from Kavanaugh's time working as White House counsel for George W. Bush. and it was only a matter of time before the nastier documents on Kavanaugh's judicial views leaked to the press.
As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times.
The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday.
Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.”
Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”
[Read the e-mail.]
He was presumably referring to then-Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, conservatives who had dissented in a 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The court now has four conservative justices who may be willing to overturn Roe — Justices Thomas and John C. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and if he is confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could provide the decisive fifth vote.
Still, his email stops short of saying whether he personally believed that the abortion rights precedent should be considered a settled legal issue.
This alone should have disqualified Kavanaugh, clearly he's going to overturn Roe and allow states to decide whether or not abortion is legal.
What Democrats are going to do to stop him, I don't know, but the charade is clearly over.
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