Confirmation is ‘not normal’

Klobuchar says Kavanaugh’s confirmation is ‘not normal’

By AUBREE ELIZA WEAVER

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process is anything but normal, Sen. Amy Klobuchar told host Chuck Todd on Sunday morning on NBC's “Meet the Press.”

“The point I’m going to make is that this is not normal,” said Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kavanaugh is slated to testify before the committee this Tuesday. “You have a nominee with excellent credentials, with his family behind him. You have the cameras there. You have the senators questioning. But this isn’t normal.”

“It’s not normal, because we are not able to see 100,000 documents that the archivist has just — because the administration has said we can’t see them,” Klobuchar added. “They’ve exerted their executive power — 148,000 documents that I’ve seen, that you cannot see, because they won’t allow us to make them public. So I can’t even tell you about them right now on this show.”

The Senate has been battling over the release of records from Kavanaugh’s time serving in former President George W. Bush’s White House. Approximately 287,000 pages of documents have been made public from his time in the Bush administration, but Democrats argue that the GOP is standing in the way of a transparent assessment of Kavanaugh’s record by not releasing all the documents.

When asked whetherany of the concealed documents could make Kavanaugh unqualified for a spot on the nation’s highest court, Klobuchar said: “I think that you could ask some very interesting questions about these documents that I’m unable to even say because I’m not able to make them public — and I don’t know what the result would be of a hearing.”

And some of the papers Klobuchar has seen have made her question Kavanaugh’s ability to be a fair justice.

“[The papers] would certainly bolster, strongly bolster, the arguments that I could make,” she said.

“You have a nominee who had one of the most expansive views of presidential power that we've seen in history. This is a guy that says, one, ‘A president should be able to declare a statute constitutional all by himself.’ That he, in writing, has said, ‘You should throw out the special counsel statute.’ This is all very relevant. And no, it's not normal.”