there was one more step before the Judiciary Committee could take its important next vote on the nomination. Kavanaugh had to respond to written “questions for the record” from members of the committee. Senators began posing written questions to Supreme Court nominees only in the 1970s. Scalia received three questions. Gorsuch received 324.
And on the afternoon of Monday, September 10, Kavanaugh was asked to respond to a record-shattering 1,287 questions—more than all previous nominees combined. To keep the nomination on track, he would have to return his answers by Wednesday evening, a nearly impossible task.
It was obvious the unheard-of number of questions was not submitted in good faith. Four of the ten Democrats on the committee had already announced they would vote against Kavanaugh, another four had indicated they were likely to vote against him, and the ranking member, Dianne Feinstein, had assured supporters in mid-July that she was ready to lead the opposition against the nominee, yet Democrats accounted for all but four of the questions. Kavanaugh’s supporters were convinced this was yet another delaying tactic by Democrats hoping that the nominee would be unable to respond by the deadline or would stumble into a perjury trap.
Answering the questions began in the Department of Justice, where a team sorted questions by topic and distributed them to clerks in charge of each issue. Each clerk drafted answers based first and foremost on what had already been said at the hearing. Any new material would have to come from the judge himself and would have to be carefully expressed to avoid contradicting anything that had been said at the hearing or privately to a senator. They knew the senators would seize on any opportunity, fair or unfair, to allege perjury.
The questions revisited all the topics that had been brought up in the hearings, from Kavanaugh’s views on abortion jurisprudence to his personal credit card debt, as well as tough new questions arising out of the hearings.
For example, Kavanaugh was asked about an incident in which the father of a victim of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, had approached him after his testimony in the hearing room. The judge had turned away and continued out of the room, an apparent snub that became a major news story. Kavanaugh responded that he did not recognize the man and had assumed he was one of the many protesters at the hearing. Ordinarily, Kerri Kupec accompanied him to identify the people who approached him and to keep him from getting mobbed, but she had not received a pass that day. In the commotion of the hearing room, most members of the White House team couldn’t hear what the man was saying. Everyone’s nerves were on edge, and the marshals hustled Kavanaugh toward the exit as the man approached. “If I had known who he was, I would have shaken his hand, talked to him, and expressed my sympathy. And I would have listened to him,” Kavanaugh wrote.1 It was true. Claire Murray was the aide who informed Kavanaugh who the man was, and he was mortified.
Little new information emerged from the myriad questions and answers. One exception was confirmation that he had spoken to Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the position of solicitor general. He had decided to remain a judge, and the position went to Noel Francisco, his former colleague in the Bush White House.
Despite the lack of good faith behind most of the questions, Kavanaugh’s answers were still important, and not merely because his opponents would exploit any error. Senator Hirono, for instance, asked him about Rice v Cayetano, in which the Supreme Court struck down as racially discriminatory a law restricting a certain state office to “Native Hawaiians.”2 Hirono, who had already announced her “no” vote, was trying to persuade Senator Lisa Murkowski to vote against Kavanaugh on the grounds that his views on race-based voting would be detrimental to Native Alaskans. In his answer, Kavanaugh carefully clarified that the “Supreme Court’s 7-2 opinion 18 years ago in Rice v Cayetano had no effect on the rights and privileges of American Indians and Alaska natives that the Court had long recognized” and that the case had “nothing to do with the sovereign rights of Alaska Natives and American Indians to run their own government affairs, including administering Tribal elections.”
Senator Jeff Flake was the only Republican to submit a question with potential pitfalls for the nominee. His staff told Kavanaugh’s team before the hearings that he was bothered by the politicization of