Kavanaugh’s papers matter. You need to call.

Deadline: Just pick up the phone and call, would it kill you?

You don’t call. You don’t write. You think they don’t notice, but they do.

Back-channel reports to some Indivisible East Bay members confirm what press reports are starting to say: Senators aren’t hearing from their constituents about Brett Kavanaugh, and there’s no groundswell against him.

We know, it’s hard to get all excited about documents, especially with everything else going on, but let’s look at a little history:

• 1971: during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee William Rehnquist, who joined the Court in 1972 and served as Chief Justice from 1986-2005, the Senate asked Rehnquist about a memo he wrote as a Supreme Court law clerk. In the memo, Rehnquist said the court’s 1896 ruling upholding racial segregation “was right and should be reaffirmed” – he said nope, that was just the opinion of Justice Robert Jackson, for whom he was clerking. The Senate, because those were gentler times, accepted the excuse; most historians don’t. Things might have been very different if the Democratic-controlled Senate had rejected Rehnquist and another judge had gone on to be approved.

• 1971: The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a previously secret official Department of Defense history of the USA’s involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the papers, released them (without permission). The papers showed that the US carried out actions during the Vietnam War that the Johnson Administration kept secret even from Congress; that the administration had consistently lied about the war; that mainstream media reports about the war were untrue; and that the public was deliberately kept completely in the dark.
• 1974: 34 years ago this week, on July 30, 1974, after President Nixon had resisted a prolonged attempt to require him to release information about the Watergate affair and other material, he finally complied with the Supreme Court’s decree and released subpoenaed recordings of White House meetings to the special prosecutor. The contents of those recordings, transcripts of which were made public, contributed to his resignation on August 9.
• 1987: During the Reagan administration, the Tower Commission investigated the so-called Iran-Contra affair. They retrieved backup copies of files from a National Security Council computer mainframe, after NSC staff deleted the original files. Using these files and other documents, the Commission proved that the US government had broken numerous laws by secretly selling weapons to Iran (and also to Iraq) during the Iran-Iraq war.
• 2017: A letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and DHS Acting Inspector General John Kelly signed by six Senators, including Kamala Harris, says “We write today deeply alarmed by reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been improperly – and perhaps unlawfully – destroying records of families that it separated at the border. … According to two officials at DHS, records linking children to their parents are mysteriously disappearing or being intentionally destroyed.”

What’s in the documents that Kavanaugh won’t turn over from his tenure in the Bush White House? Well, we don’t know, since we haven’t seen them, although there are now reports that Kavanaugh might have advised President Bush on how to get around the ban on torture during that time, and that we’d find information about this in the records that Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley won’t supply.

There’s still time to make our voices heard. The SF Chronicle quotes prominent local professor and Constitutional Law expert Rory Little as saying that “a ‘galvanized grassroots movement’ might change the equation.” And even the head of the libertarian/right-wing Federalist Society told the ultra-right wing corporate overlord Koch network that we have a chance to scuttle this nomination. BUT: you need to pick up that phone AND then get all your friends to pick up their phones. Especially your friends who live in Maine and Alaska, home of crucial swing Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski – these Senators felt the heat on health care and voted the right way, but they’re not feeling the pressure now, and they need to.

What to say:

My name is ____. My zip code is ____ and I’m a member of Indivisible East Bay. Thank you for demanding to review all of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s relevant documents. Please keep it up! What we know about his views on reproductive rights, health care, and executive power is frightening enough already. I want to know what else is in his record that Republicans are so desperate to hide from the American people.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: (email); (415) 393-0707 • DC: (202) 224-3841

Sen. Kamala Harris: (email); (415) 355-9041 • DC: (202) 224-3553