WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa receives high marks for his leadership of the confirmation process for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in an op-ed in The Hill. Excerpts can be found below.
When future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed later this month, the unsung hero of the battle will be Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley, who is spearheading one of the most profound changes to the federal judiciary in modern history, had already played a central role in confirming a record number of circuit court judges and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Following Kavanaugh’s nomination, Grassley smoothly navigated through choppy political waters, running the hearings with aplomb and applying just the right touch for the brilliant, polished Kavanaugh to shine at his brightest.
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Throughout this battle, Chairman Grassley and his staff outmaneuvered Democrats at each step, diligently producing 483,000 documents for review, the largest number ever for a Supreme Court nominee and more than the five previous nominees combined.
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Chairman Grassley extended his hand to work with any Senator who wanted to use Committee Confidential documents to question Judge Kavanaugh during the hearing. Only a single Democrat requested materials. Grassley’s staff promptly made them available to her.
All told, Grassley’s team logged over 5,000 hours on document review and Judge Kavanaugh’s hearing preparation. The Senator himself was at the Capitol on Labor Day, working over 12 hours preparing for the hearing that would take place fifty-seven days after Kavanaugh’s appointment, a week longer than those of Justices Gorsuch, Kagan and Sotomayor.
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Calmly, steadily, with a dogged fidelity to preservation of free speech, Grassley gave Democrats their rope. As their partners in the audience rudely and noisily disrupted the proceedings, Senators exhausted themselves and the American people with their persistent haranguing of Judge Kavanaugh, hurling accusations and badgering him as if he were a defendant in a criminal trial.
Whether Cory Booker’s falsely proclaimed Spartacus moment — Grassley and his team worked until 4AM that day to release the documents Booker claimed were confidential Democrats’ false and misleading accusations about withheld records, phony insinuations about Roe v. Wade or deliberate misrepresentations of Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions and other writings, Chairman Grassley, unruffled, let Democrats put their pettiness, meanness, and foolishness on display for 300 million Americans.
At just the right moments he intervened to deflate misleading lines of questioning, correct fallacious assertions, and hold Committee members to account, solidifying Judge Kavanaugh’s spectacular performance.
Chairman Grassley has led an extremely fair and transparent process. President Trump’s outstanding judicial legacy, the indelible mark he is leaving on the federal courts including the confirmation of soon to be Justice Brett Kavanaugh, could not occur without the groundwork, persistence, and heroics of Senator Charles Grassley.
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