Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,33

opening day of Kavanaugh’s testimony, Judiciary Committee Democrat and presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar continued trying to tie Kavanaugh to the Mueller investigation in her opening statement, saying that Democrats’ duty in these hearings was to figure out whether Kavanaugh viewed the president as above the law and to delve into his view of “laws protecting the special counsel.” Once again, it was all about the Russia story.

A comparison of former senator Sessions’s statement at the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing in 2009 with Feinstein’s statement at the Kavanaugh hearing shows just how politicized this latter hearing had become. Sessions criticized Sotomayor but based his criticism on the nominee’s record and views pertinent to her role as a Supreme Court justice. By contrast, Senator Feinstein’s statement at Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing lists a series of criticisms of President Trump.

Stalling and Distraction

Having established the narrative, the Democrats now merely have to distract the public from looking too closely. Believe it or not, the boring function of requesting documents can be weaponized to create quite a distraction. Document requests can be written in such a way that they build narratives that manipulate public opinion and contribute to the pointless circus surrounding false narratives. This tactic wasn’t unique to the Kavanaugh hearings, but the hearings are a textbook example of how the play is run. Pay close attention to how this particular tactic is deployed. As long as we have a Republican president in the White House, they’ll run this play again and again.

The trick with this gambit is making the public believe Senate Democrats actually cared about reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on a nominee many had already pledged to oppose. The narrative depended on projecting a sincere desire to vet the man’s record, when the reality was a covert desire to delay the confirmation hearings.

The first step is the submission of a document request sufficiently broad that it will prove impossible to fill in any reasonable amount of time. The intent is not to review the resulting documents, but to rail about documents that are missing. If the document request is not broad enough, they run the risk of actually getting all the documents. Then they would have nothing to complain about.

In the case of Kavanaugh, Democrats wanted every document Kavanaugh had touched during his time as a White House staffer for the George W. Bush administration. In an unprecedented move, Chairman Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told the committee that Senator Feinstein demanded “the search of every email and every other document from every one of the hundreds of White House aides who came and went during the entire eight years of the Bush Administration.”

These documents would be difficult to get and of little value. Feinstein would have known many of these documents would be protected by executive privilege. All the better.

According to comments from Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas during the hearings, every single Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee had announced opposition to Kavanaugh before the very first hearing. Their minds were made up. No volume of documents was going to change them. It was all a sham.

By demanding an impossibly broad series of documents they knew would be both difficult to get and of little value, they had a pretext to do what they likely would have done anyway—refuse to meet with the nominee, a move that might conveniently also delay the hearings. Many of them did refuse, waiting until the cameras were on to ask Kavanaugh simple questions that a genuine seeker of facts could have ascertained long before the hearings.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer continued framing the Democrat narrative, gaslighting the public into thinking Kavanaugh was hiding his record.

In August, Schumer tweeted:

Republicans’ mad rush to hold this hearing after unilaterally deciding to block nearly all of Judge Kavanaugh’s records from public release is further evidence that they are hiding important information from the American people, and continues to raise the question, #WhatAreTheyHiding?

In a subsequent tweet, he wrote:

Republican efforts to make this the least transparent, most secretive Supreme Court nomination in history continue. They seem to be more frightened of this nominee’s record and history than any we’ve ever considered.

In reality, more documents were produced on Judge Kavanaugh’s record than on any of the previous nominees’. Over a two-month period, Democrats had access to the following documents:

An 18,000-page response to the committee’s Senate Judiciary Questionnaire (SJQ)

All of Kavanaugh’s published writings

307 judicial opinions Kavanaugh wrote

Hundreds of opinions Kavanaugh joined

All available footage and transcripts of Kavanaugh’s