All of the dirty tricks and breaks from tradition being perpetrated by the GOP to make sure Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed are happening for one reason: Republicans are aware they are likely to lose the House in November. In 2020, they are likely to lose the Senate and the presidency. The only way they can continue running America is to make sure the judicial branch is staunchly conservative. That way, judges can rule efforts to make the country more progressive and tolerant unconstitutional.
The rest of this post will focus on the dirty tricks and breaks from tradition being employed to rush through the confirmation process.
- No discussion about the Supreme Court can be had without a reminder that Republicans, citing the pending 2016 election, refused to hold a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland. Now, that Republicans could lose the Senate in November, they are rushing Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.
- Traditionally, the National Archives has handled document requests related to Supreme Court nominees and the hearing process. When the National Archives said it couldn’t meet the timetable the GOP created to make sure the process was done before the election, Republicans hired an attorney named Bill Burck to lead a team sifting through the documents.
- Bill Burck was Kavanaugh’s subordinate when Kavanaugh worked in the George W. Bush administration.
- In his private practice, Burck is representing Republicans, including White House Counsel Don McGahn and Steve Bannon, in their dealings with Robert Mueller.
- The presidential Records Act allows both the president who employed a nominee and the current president to claim executive privilege on documents associated with a nominee.
- When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, he didn’t claim executive privilege on any document associated with her time in the White House.
- In fact, no current president has ever claimed executive privilege on documents related to a nominee’s work.
- Donald Trump has claimed executive privilege on more than 101,000 pages of documents from Kavanaugh’s time in George W. Bush’s White House.
- According to Bill Burck, many of the pages now subject to executive privilege relate to Kavanaugh’s work on judicial nominees put forth by the George W. Bush administration.
In summation, the GOP refused to hold a confirmation hearing because of a pending election. Now, the GOP is rushing a hearing because of an election.
Claiming the need for a rushed schedule, the GOP has hired the nominees former subordinate to decide which documents can be seen by the public.
In a first, the sitting president, who made the nomination, is claiming privilege to keep the public from seeing more than 101,000 pages of documents involving his nominee.
The nominee whose writings are being protected by the president once wrote an article saying a sitting president should be protected from criminal and civil proceedings. The current president claiming the privilege is a subject in an ongoing criminal investigation.
How many of you really support these kinds of shanangons?