Ted Cruz's Opening Statement: Kavanaugh Should Be Confirmed Based on His Eloquent Defense of the Bofa Doctrine Alone

Great opening by Ted Cruz.

Here is a breakdown of the statement, so you can go to any part that interests you:

First Cruz talks about "what this hearing is about and what it is not about," proving that the Democrats have offered no substantive objections to Kavanaugh, as no such objections can plausibly exist, and so turn to "pounding the table" and making beef over silly procedural objections about how many documents they've received.

Then he says "But let's talk about those documents for a moment," and notes that 480,000 pages of documents have been produced, which is greater than the number of pages produced for the last five Supreme Court nominees combined.

Then he talks about the documents that haven't been produced. These, Cruz says, are almost all documents authored by other people which were merely collated and passed to President Bush by Kavanaugh in his capacity as Staff Secretary, and therefore tell us nothing about Kavanaugh's thinking or beliefs. Further, Cruz says, because these are presidential advisers' communications to the president, they are strictly protected from disclosure by the law. Thus, he concludes, the Democrats are demanding documents precisely because they know these documents cannot be produced at all.

Then he asks, "So what is this hearing all about?" He says it's all about the Democrats being unhappy about the voters' considered choice in 2016, and wanting to overturn that. But he notes that this was the first election since Eisenhower which occurred with an open Supreme Court seat in play, and thus the next Supreme Court nominee indirectly on the ballot. And he notes that the issue of judicial appointments was vigorously contested by both Trump and Hillary Clinton, the issue being asked about in every single debate, and with both candidates stating the type of judge they would nominate.

Cruz points out that Trump took the "unprecedented" step of publishing a list of his likely Supreme Court picks. He implies without directly stating that Kavanaugh was on this list. (Kavanaugh was in fact on the short list.)

Therefore, Cruz concludes, Kavanaugh has something he calls "super-legitimacy" as a Supreme Court nominee, as the voters were already told that he might well be a Supreme Court choice by Trump and chose to elect Trump. Cruz calls this a de facto "referendum" on the acceptability of Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice.

Finally, Cruz points out that progressives use the courts to win policy fights they cannot win at the ballot, and points out that America has been debating big policy issues that the left would like to win via the courts. And in the face of that, they chose Trump, who promised to appoint constitutionalists. He specifically notes that every Democrat Senator voted to gut the First Amendment, and that many Democrat Senators voted to repeal the Religious Freedom Act signed into law by Bill Clinton, and that almost every Democrat wants to effectively repeal the Second Amendment.

Huge debates about which virtually every voter was aware -- and every voter was aware what kind of candidates each nominee would select. So again, Cruz concludes, the Democrats are simply trying to undo the will of the American people.

Really good stuff.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:04 PM

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