of their constituents care about. roe v. wade obviously is huge in addition to executive power and i would expect also this notion of just beyond the executive power related to donald trump, also how activist a judge is he going to be to unravel long-standing precedent on other issues, as well? there s an age discrimination case coming up before the court, for example, on whether states and localities, whether localities subject to age discrimination cases if they have 20 employees or fewer. these matter to people in the daily lives. i would expect to hear some of that. i absolutely agree that republicans jobs here to establish that pretd kavanaugh is not an activist judge and will pay attention to precedent. it will be interesting to see if democrats come hard. you have both senator durbin and senator leahy who remembered when brett kavanaugh was not so
offense. i call out senator durbin. i don t say how you can say i was working with senator durbin. i m from the state and i called him out specifically. we are not working with the democrats. we are working for ourselves. it was our time as committee members yesterday to make our case. today is different. today is the day that the american people are supposed to hear from the nominee. this morning, we ll begin our questioning of judge kavanaugh. we ll get through all members first round of questions today. no matter how long it takes. members are allotted 30 minutes for the first round. if your time expires, your remaining questions may be continued, of course, in the second round tomorrow. we ll take a lunch break as well
the documents ahead of time, not dumped some night before and 100,000 pages withheld entirely because of executive privilege. there s a lot of i think unfortunate arguments being made by the republican senate right now. why doesn t brett kavanaugh interpret and say i ll put them forth? they re mine. transparency. i happen to see your twitter account yesterday. why not? and your pie in the sky hopes that someone would just launch a surprise into this carefully choreographed hearing. listen. if you re brett kavanaugh, they re your documents. looking at the chaos. hey, clean it all up! there s a big worry, right? the ticking clock in the november election. and that s what judge kavanaugh has to be worried about and the supporters. there s nothing going on in october at the court, yes. first monday. there s no big case that s being heard and same republican senate that didn t even give merritt garland a hearing. i think that s really the issue. wouldn t that indicate he is
independent judiciary. obviously, everybody learns in eighth grade civics about judges interpre interpreting law. the judiciary must continue to be the least political and least dangerous branch. judge s sole judge is find and apply the law, evenly and fairly without regard to the president who nominated him, the senators who voted for him, the parties before him and the political consequences of his judicial decision. so, judge, let s discuss judicial independence from the executive branch. no one, not even the president, is above the law. some of my colleagues have criticized your views of presidential authority suggesting wrongly in my opinion that your views of presidential authority would not allow any meaningful check on the president, particularly this one. please tell us what judicial independence means to you including whether you have any
judicial power, you look at federalist 78. and what s described there is a system of precedent. precedent is rooted right into the constitution itself. and constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to the rules of precedent. beyond that, being a good judge means paying attention to the words that are written. the words of the constitution, the words of the statutes that are passed by congress. not doing what i want to do. not deferring when the executive rewrites the laws passed by congress. but respect for the laws passed by congress, respect for the rule law, the words put into the constitution itself. that s part of being a good judge. that s part of being independent. that s part of precedent. and then i would say being a good judge there are human qualities in terms of the interaction. although these confirmation processes focus on one person,