Kavanaugh hearing to be held in September
McConnell says Senate is on track to confirm him by Oct. 1
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings will be held the first week of September, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, announced Friday.
The hearings for President Donald Trump’s pick to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy will be held Sept. 4-7, according to a notice sent to Senate Republican offices Friday and obtained by The Washington Post, although the committee noted that the hearing could be three or four days.
“As I said after his nomination, Judge Kavanaugh is one of the most respected jurists in the country and one of the most qualified nominees ever to be considered by the Senate for a seat on our highest court,” Grassley said in a statement Friday. “He’s a mainstream judge. He has a record of judicial independence and applying the law as it is written. He’s met with dozens of senators who have nothing but positive things to say.”
The first day of hearings will be dedicated to opening statements from senators. Kavanaugh will go under questioning Sept. 5. Then outside witnesses, legal experts and the American Bar Association will follow.
“He’ll get confirmed. It won’t be a landslide, but he’ll get confirmed,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in an interview Friday morning with WKDZ radio in Kentucky. He said the Senate was “moving right along” for Kavanaugh to be confirmed by Oct. 1, when the Supreme Court will convene for its fall term.
Grassley’s team of counsels and other aides have reviewed 4,800 pages of legal opinions that Kavanaugh wrote, more than 17,000 pages related to Kavanaugh’s committee questionnaire, and more than 184,000 pages of the nominee’s documents from his tenure working in the George W. Bush White House and for independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
But the documents have been a major point of contention in the Senate. Democratic senators have been infuriated with how Grassley and other Republicans have released Kavanaugh’s documents in a slow trickle since the papers began arriving at the Senate late last week.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, raised concerns about a “lack of transparency” in releasing Kavanaugh’s papers in a new letter to Grassley on Friday. The committee has received about 175,000 pages from the Bush library, but has only publicly released 5,700 pages.
“Simply stated, this is unacceptable. The senators and the public must have access to Mr. Kavanaugh’s full record,” Feinstein wrote to Grassley.