On Monday, six Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats filed suit against the National Archives and Records Administration in an attempt to pry loose the documents of just what Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was doing in his position as attorney in the Bush White House. This, because Judiciary Committee Republicans, the George W. Bush presidential library and the Trump-led CIA have all stonewalled requests for those records as Republicans push to confirm Kavanaugh before that information can be made public.
"The Senate and the American public have a brief opportunity to sift the record of Judge Kavanaugh’s public career before the Senate is expected to make an effectively irreversible decision that would shape the federal judiciary for decades, and the individual Senators have a unique platform to probe and publicize Judge Kavanaugh’s record," lawyers for the senators at the watchdog group American Oversight wrote in Monday's filing.
The primary blame can be placed on Republican Judiciary Committee head Sen. Chuck Grassley, who refused to request the full set of records to begin with under the pretense that they would somehow not be relevant. Since Grassley and the other Republicans have refused to use their own powers to expedite the records requests, it's left to Democrats and the wider public to pry them loose via Freedom of Information Act requests and, at this point, lawsuits.
As to why this is happening, there's not a lot of mystery to it: We can make some very good guesses as to why Republicans have been adamant in blocking records of what attorney Brett Kavanaugh was doing in that Bush administration. It's already evident that he lied to the Senate in both this and past confirmation hearings about his involvement in a host of judicial nominations and other hyper partisan efforts.
Furthermore, it's almost certain he has a more intimate involvement with two of the Bush administration's greatest scandals, the legal justification for the torture of prisoners of war and for the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or process, than as the rote paper-shuffler he purports to have been. His current denials are simply implausible.
Any of those would be deal-breakers, for any Senate supposedly concerned with the character of justices or with, sigh, its own basic oversight functions. So Republicans have decided to bury as much as can be buried and hope none of it comes out until the nominee is safely on the court and, in their estimation, therefore immune to new revelations. It's been a cynical game, but the game was already cynical when Republicans rewrote the rules to declare that sitting presidents don't get Supreme Court nominations heard for the last quarter of their terms because (hand-waving) "reasons."
This is (one of the reasons) why we need to take back the Senate. Can you give $3 to help win Nevada and Texas?