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Senate Democrats remain steadfast in their demand that the nomination process for Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court wait until all of his documents from his time with the George W. Bush administration are released. Republicans are still intent on trying to hide what happened during three years of that service, when he was Bush's staff secretary, the person in charge of what the president saw on his desk every day.
That wasn't all he did. He was "also a key part of the president’s speechwriting process, helped put together legislation and worked on drafting and revising executive orders, … and traveled with the president, at points sitting in on meetings between the president and foreign leaders." That all sounds so normal and reasonable, right? So this AP article making it into a "Democrats say, Republicans say" just shows a typical partisan fight, right?
Wrong. There's a lot more here to what Kavanaugh was doing in those three years as Bush's staff secretary—2003-06—that is directly relevant to Kavanaugh's views now about the power of the president. One of those things is torture. Sen. Patrick Leahy has the goods on that, a "2004 email showing Bush's Deputy Nat Sec Advisor wanted then-Staff Sec. Kavanaugh looped in on spinning the torture memo," from a previous freedom of information act request. As Leahy tweeted, it's "a drop in the bucket" in terms of the documents being withheld, "and IN THAT DROP they are discussing TORTURE."
In an op-ed in The New York Times, Leahy expands on that, and the fact that the last time Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate, in his 2006 confirmation hearing to the D.C. Circuit, he didn't tell the truth about torture and about the Bush administration's abuses of power he was privy to.
Senator Dick Durbin and I asked about his knowledge of several Bush-era scandals, including warrantless wiretapping, torture and detainee treatment. Judge Kavanaugh testified that he had no knowledge of such issues until he read about them in the newspaper. But a year after his confirmation, press reports indicated that he had participated in a heated discussion in the White House over the legality of detainee policies.
Kavanaugh was part of the Bush team in the Office of White House Counsel that cooked up the torture and surveillance and detention schemes. Then as Bush's right-hand guy, he was part of the team that worked on spinning them once they became public. That's what he was doing up until the time he lied in that job interview with the Senate.
No one wants to talk about torture anymore, not with a whole new presidential scandal that is looking more and more treasonous by the day. But Trump's Russia affair is precisely why we have to be talking about torture now. It's why this isn't just an election year political game. It's about potentially putting a man on the Supreme Court who would be willing to let a treasonous president—the one who gave him the job—off the hook.
This isn't just politics. It's not just a squabble. As Leahy says from "reproductive rights to presidential immunity, health care to marriage equality, I have never seen so much at stake with a single seat." When it comes right down to it, it's the Constitution that's at stake, at its very core.