and vote for Kavanaugh. Good news can be shared over the phone, but bad news has to be shared in person, they surmised.
Claire McCaskill of Missouri, also on the short list of Democrats who were in play, told Kavanaugh that while everybody expressed confidence she’d do the right thing politically, she wished someone would tell her what the right thing was. She was in a difficult reelection battle in a state that Trump had carried by an eighteen-point margin.7 But she had voted against Gorsuch and was prepared to vote against Kavanaugh, citing her objections to the Citizens United decision. Kavanaugh, an equal-opportunity supporter of the First Amendment, had anticipated the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United in his own opinion in Emily’s List v Federal Election Commission, ruling that the abortion advocacy group had a right to raise and spend money to promote the candidates or policies of its choice.8 McCaskill was open about her growing unease with the Senate, finding it an unpleasant place to work in part because of the decline of centrists. She attributed this polarization to the flood of special-interest money into campaign coffers. Indeed, her own campaign had received $1.6 million from Emily’s List alone, including over half a million dollars in that very cycle.9
A meeting with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island was unproductive, but Feinstein couldn’t have been friendlier. Meetings with Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota went well. All allowed the judge to preview some of the issues they would address during the hearings, ranging from race to antitrust law. Still, these meetings were very different from those with Republicans. Cory Booker, appearing at a press conference with other potential presidential candidates, had depicted Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a question of good versus evil. There were no bystanders, he said, descending into the most offensive hyperbole: “You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”10
Kyl was occasionally unable to attend Kavanaugh’s meetings with senators, but McGahn was in every one, an irenic presence amid the partisan tension. He knew most senators from campaigns he’d helped them with or from seeking their advice on judicial nominations.
“Of all the White House Counsels going back to 1981, I don’t think there’s been one that made judicial selection a more central part of his daily business than Don McGahn,” observes Leonard Leo. “And there certainly has not been one who engaged in more direct shuttle diplomacy with Capitol Hill on behalf of individual nominees. Don knew the transformation of the federal judiciary was a top priority of President Trump’s, and he got right down to business.”
McGahn was also savvy about dangerous situations. On a heavily scheduled August day, the team got split up in the underground tunnels of the Senate office buildings on the way to a meeting with Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who had already denounced the nomination in a column in the New York Times.11 Kyl and McGahn arrived at Leahy’s office to find Kavanaugh already there with the harrumphing seventy-eight-year-old senator. Leahy announced that he wanted to meet with Kavanaugh alone. Kyl got up to leave despite the team’s firm policy of no one-on-one meetings with hostile senators, but McGahn protested. After Senator Blumenthal’s twisting of Neil Gorsuch’s words from their pre-confirmation meeting, he did not want the same thing to happen to Kavanaugh. He had no option but to leave, but he was thankful nothing bad came out of the private meeting.
Arranging personal visits with the men and women who would vote on Kavanaugh was the easy part of the confirmation effort. His background in the Whitewater investigation and his tenure in the White House, especially as staff secretary, however, produced an enormous logistical challenge. Before Kavanaugh’s nomination, McConnell had fretted about the staggering amount of paperwork senators would have to sift through to evaluate him. His legal opinions, emails and memos, and the papers that simply crossed his desk in the White House might amount to some seven million pages.
Kavanaugh’s paper trail was vastly larger than any previous nominee’s, and paperwork had been a point of contention in previous confirmation fights. In fact, William Rehnquist’s nomination as chief justice hit a major speed bump when President Reagan refused to release to the Senate just a few sensitive documents Rehnquist had written fifteen years earlier. There were about 70,000 pages relating to John Roberts’s time in the Justice Department and the Reagan White