Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday he still wants to have Judge Brett Kavanaugh confirmed and sitting on the Supreme Court by the start…
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday he still wants to have Judge Brett Kavanaugh confirmed and sitting on the Supreme Court by the start of the new term in October.
That is an aggressive schedule that means senators would hold a final vote well before all of the documents they’ve requested about his background would be released to the public by the National Archives
“I think he’s going to be confirmed, hopefully before the first Monday in October,” Mr. McConnell told WKDZ radio.
Mr. McConnell said the process is “moving right along” despite near-universal opposition from Democrats.
“He’ll get confirmed. It won’t be a landslide, but he’ll get confirmed,” the senator said.
Democratic leaders have said they want to see perhaps 4 million pages of documents from Judge Kavanaugh ’s time in the Bush White House from 2001 to 2006.
Republicans have officially asked for just the first half of that time, when the judge was working in the White House counsel’s office. They say there’s no pressing reason to see the documents from late 2003 to 2006 when he was staff secretary — a job they say mostly involved shifting papers.
But even the early documents from 2001 to 2003 won’t be fully processed and released by the Archives until the end of October.
GOP senators say most Democrats have already said they will oppose Judge Kavanaugh without bothering to review his record, so Republicans don’t feel any pressure to wait for the document release before voting.
