Supreme Court nominee Kavanagh meets privately with 2 Senate Democrats

WASHINGTON – Two Democratic senators met privately with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday as top Democrats and outside groups assailed Republicans for refusing to release many of his archived White House records.

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who face tough re-election battles in states that supported Trump in 2016, met behind closed doors in their Capitol Hill offices with Kavanaugh – but didn’t appear with him afterward for the usual photo ops.

Donnelly and Heitkamp became the second and third Democrats to sit down with Kavanaugh after another red-state Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), met with him on July 30. All three Democrats voted last year to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Those meetings during the Senate’s rare August session and amid the battle over the nominee's records come as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa),  the Judiciary Committee chairman, pushes ahead with Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, now scheduled to begin on Sept. 4, the day after Labor Day.

Under that schedule, Republicans could confirm Kavanaugh, if none of them defects, by the beginning of the Supreme Court’s new term on Oct. 1.

Nearly all Republican senators have met with Kavanaugh – Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. Jerry Moran (D-Kans.) hosted him Wednesday.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), also facing a tough re-election battle, said she will meet with him next week.

And four Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, after holding off in hopes of winning negotiations for more Kavanaugh records, also have scheduled visits with Kavanaugh, The Washington Post reported.

Grassley accused Democrats on Wednesday of making demands for hundreds of thousands of Kavanaugh's records to delay his confirmation until after the mid-term elections in November, in the hopes that they would win control of the Senate.

Grassley has refused to request the nearly 1 million records involving Kavanaugh during his nearly three years as President George W. Bush’s staff secretary, calling them too sensitive and least helpful because staff secretaries don’t make policy.

He and other Republicans said Kavanaugh’s 307 decisions as a judge on the influential U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia offer a sufficient guide to how he would rule as a justice.

But Democrats point out that Kavanaugh himself calls his time as staff secretary “formative” and the most helpful to him as a judge.

Meanwhile, most records being made available now were pre-screened for Bush by an attorney who served as a deputy to Kavanaugh when he was staff secretary. In a separate process, the National Archives said it would conduct its own review, but cannot process most of the records until the end of October – almost two months after the hearing.

 “Republicans used to demand transparency for SCOTUS noms. Now they’re blocking nearly all of Judge Kavanaugh’s records from public release and trying to rush through his nomination. What are Republicans hiding?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted Wednesday.