Candidates, nominees from president republican president s have learned a lot about how to deal with the hearings. When you heard kavanaugh say as he did, talking about the parties to the case that theyre Flesh And Blood Human Beings and we need to have empathy for them and real world consequences of the court are very important. As a political matter, great stuff. A legal matter, its nonsense. Were youre an Appellate Judge and an issue comes before you, the issue is not the parties. Youre to resolve the legal issues. Its a purely legal matter. The parties may happen to be the case that they pick to do that. Now, obviously its as well as a human being to say you care about the parties, yes, you should, but thats smart to say that. Bork said when he was asked about why he wanted to be on the court back then, he said among other things, he said it was an intellectual feast. His critics got all over that. To him its a theoretical matter
kavanaugh. One is cory booker and kamala harris. No
that really is a question for the house and the senate. let me move on. this is about actual opinions and really along the same lines that i know senator coons will talk to you about. but in the seven sky v. holder case, i quote, this is you, under the constitution, the president may decline to enforce a statute that regulates private individuals when the president deems the statute unconstitutional even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional. so you told me when we had the comment in my office that you attempted to clarify your views two years later in the aiken county case. it seems inconsistent to me. is it the case your views as expressed in opinions, not law review articles, that a president can ignore a law and until a court upholds it or a
bill clinton and he was president obama s nominee to the u.s. supreme court. what i found was striking. in the 12 years you ve been on the d.c. circuit, of all the matters that you and chief judge garland had voted on together, that you voted together 93% of the time. not only that of the 28 published opinions that you ve authored where chief judge garland was on the panel, he joined 27 out of the 28 opinions you issued when you were on a panel together. in other words, he joined 96% of the panel opinions that you ve written when he was on a panel with you and the same is true in the reverse. of the 30 published opinions that chief garland has written on a panel, you ve joined 28 out of 30 of them. over 93% of those opinions.
you know well, senator, from all of your arguments and seeing judges decide cases in real time. i think those statistics reflect the reality of how judges go about their business. the supreme court is a team of nine. i try to be a team player on a team of nine. there s going to be disagreements at time. of course, if you have the mindset where a court without sitting on different sides of an aisle, without being in separate caucus rooms, trying to find what the right answer is. there is a right answer in many cases. and maybe, you know, a range of reasonable answers in some others. that s what those statistics reflect to me. so you talked about the difference between your own policy preferences and what the law described. or mandates.
whitehouse who i thought was going to be aggressive. he put everybody to sleep. the third audience is the hard left of the democratic base. i don t even think that the democrats on this committee have served that audience. no one has laid a glove on judge kavanaugh. he s not only coming off as brilliant, he s coming off as human and warm and likable. the inevitable next justice on the court. do we have dana in new york? let s go to you. as you watch this play out this afternoon, one of the things that strikes me is the fact that as grassley brought up, senator grassley, a lot of these complaints and we think about whitehouse and you think about leahy, that neither one of them availed themselves of the opportunity to look at these confidential documents when they had the opportunity. the only one that did was klobuchar. yet they re still complaining about not having access to the documents. in fact, at one point, senator leahy had to concede