- Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared for the first day of his confirmation hearings Tuesday.
- Capitol Police arrested 70 individuals demonstrating in and around the hearing room during the chaotic proceedings.
- Democrats attempted to delay the hearings, but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday for a rambunctious confirmation hearing featuring dozens of arrests and heated accusations of partisanship.
Just as the hearing opened, Democratic senators repeatedly motioned to adjourn the hearing, pending review of some 42,000 documents relating to Kavanaugh’s White House service that were submitted to the Committee on Monday night.
Nearly every Democrat on the panel went on to deliver remarks pressing for a postponement, while demonstrators heckled from the gallery. Many protestors were forcibly removed — the Capitol Police logged 70 arrests by the time the hearing concluded.
Ultimately the hearing proceeded, albeit several hours behind schedule. (RELATED: It Took Five Seconds For The Kavanaugh Hearing To Turn Into A Flaming Dumpster Fire)
Before day’s end, President Donald Trump decried Democratic tactics on Twitter.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings for the future Justice of the Supreme Court are truly a display of how mean, angry, and despicable the other side is. They will say anything, and are only….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2018
All 21 lawmakers on the committee delivered opening statements, followed by brief remarks from the nominee. Rounds of questioning will begin Wednesday morning.
Speaking after the outbursts had subsided, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin invoked the memory of the late Sen. John McCain, noting Kavanaugh helped formulate a signing statement attending the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibited the torture of enemy combatants.
In that connection, Durbin accused Kavanaugh of misleading the committee during his 2004 confirmation hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in which he denied involvement in developing the Bush administration’s positions on enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants.
Subsequent reporting revealed Kavanaugh advised on policy-making in the War on Terror, prompting Durbin and other Democrats to accuse Kavanaugh of dishonesty.
The Trump administration immediately rebutted the charge, noting that several of Kavanaugh’s former colleagues have confirmed he was not involved in detainee policy.
“As several colleagues have stated, and Judge Kavanaugh accurately said in his 2006 testimony, he was not involved in crafting legal policies that formed the rules governing detention of combatants,” deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement. “In fact, he was not even read into these compartmentalized conversations that pertained to drafting these legal memoranda and rules, and first learned of them from the news media.”
Durbin also revived a line of attack used against Kavanaugh during his appointment to the D.C. Circuit, styling the judge the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics” given his work on the Bush v. Gore case and Ken Starr’s investigations of former President Bill Clinton.
When the hearing briefly adjourned for lunch at 1:15, a gun control activists named Fred Guttenberg attempted to approach Kavanaugh to discuss the Second Amendment. Guttenberg’s daughter Jamie was killed in the February Parkland massacre. A widely-circulated tweet indicated the judge ignored Guttenberg, but the White House rebutted that video of the encounter appears to show aides escorting Kavanaugh away as Guttenberg approached.
Speaking in the mid-afternoon, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey argued that Kavanaugh’s nomination presents dramatic stakes for the country, given the rise of corporate power and spiraling healthcare costs.
“It seems so clear that in your court the same folks seem to win over and over again — the powerful, the privileged, big corporations, special interests and over and over again the folks that lose are the folks I came to Washington to fight [for],” Booker said.
Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California described her experience in a desegregation busing program as a young student, saying her career in public life would not have been possible had school officials denied her the opportunity to attend an integrated school. Her experience, she said, demonstrated the power of a Supreme Court justice.
She went on to express fears that Kavanaugh would be loyal “to the political party and conservative agenda that shaped and built [his] career,” at the expense of people with experiences like hers.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina cheekily needled Booker and Harris after their remarks, saying that a candidate who sought the Democratic nomination for president without promising to nominate judges of a certain variety would earn just one percent in the polls, as happened with his own ill-fated 2016 campaign.
Booker and Harris are both frequently mentioned as contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination.
Several Republicans, including GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ted Cruz of Texas said Democratic lawmakers were acting in bad faith, as many have already committed to voting against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. (RELATED: Linda Sarsour Arrested For Disrupting The Kavanaugh Hearings)
Other Republicans like Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and John Kennedy of Louisiana lamented the outsized role the high court plays in public life, and criticized their congressional colleagues for ceding power to the executive branch and the judiciary.
Kavanaugh finally spoke late in the day, making frequent reference to his would-be predecessor, Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom he identified as his judicial hero, along with his mother, who was a state judge in Maryland.
“A good judge must be an umpire — a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy,” Kavanaugh said, echoing Chief Justice John Roberts. “As Justice Kennedy explained in Texas v. Johnson, one of his greatest opinions, judges do not make decisions to reach a preferred result. Judges make decisions because ‘the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result.'”
The Johnson decision struck down a state law that banned desecration of the flag.
Kavanaugh elsewhere described his experiences leading seminars at elite law school, noting Justice Elena Kagan hired him to teach a course when she was the dean of Harvard Law School. He appeared to choke up as he thanked friends and family for their support, and recounted his experiences coaching girls basketball.
All told, the hearing affected a normal tenor by the afternoon, after chaos and disorder attended the opening of Tuesday’s proceedings.
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