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Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Hank Johnson, chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, announced Tuesday that they had officially requested records from the National Archives related to now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
In their letter to National Archivist David Ferriero, the chairmen note that then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley limited his document request, and didn't request any of the records of Kavanaugh's service as staff secretary to George W. Bush from 2003-06. Grassley also withdrew his request for records for Kavanaugh's service in the White House Counsel's office. Eventually, Grassley decided to scrap getting any records at all from the non-partisan National Archives, and instead took the unprecedented route of having documents fed to the committee through a process led and supervised entirely by William Burck, Bush's personal lawyer and former deputy to Kavanaugh in the White House.
Republicans withheld something like 92% of the documents from Kavanaugh's time in the Bush White House. The Archives said it had about 3.85 million pages of records related to his tenure, but fewer than 300,000 were made available to the committee and to the public—and then in a very short time frame. Not a single page of what the committee saw was from the Archives, but House Democrats want that to change, because what's in those documents could prove once and for all that Kavanaugh lied under oath to the Senate. They could also shed light on his true views on issues such as Roe v. Wade, revealing biases that should disqualify him from hearing abortion-related cases in the future.
It was clear at the time of his hearings that Kavanaugh was not being truthful with the committee, now and back in 2006 when he was being confirmed for a lower court seat.
He downplayed his role in facilitating virulently anti-abortion nominations to the courts for Bush in 2006. He lied to the committee about what he knew about the lawless programs of warrantless surveillance and torture in the Bush administration in 2006. He was even lying about stuff that stretched back to the Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton. What we don't know is the extent of Kavanaugh's lying about all of these things during his hearings in 2018—for a position on the highest court of the land.
This is significant now because, as Nadler and Johnson write, "In the coming year, the Supreme Court will again address important matters regarding civil rights, criminal justice, and immigration. The Court may also review certain high-profile cases related to reproductive rights, the separation of powers, and the limits of executive authority—all topics within the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee." Kavanaugh will be in a position to rule on those issues and he is under a cloud. "Now and as always," they write, "the Court's fidelity to the principles of equal and impartial justice, as well as the public's faith in the integrity of the judiciary, are foundational to maintaining the rule of law."
That faith was rocked by an illegitimate Senate process that put a person of highly questionable character on the nation's highest court, for life—unless there's enough in these documents to impeach him.