Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are using the 2018 midterm elections as a springboard to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
And they settled on one fight to make that a reality.
But their plan just ended in catastrophic defeat.
Schumer and the Democrats are using every measure available to stop the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which they believed would energize their base heading into the November midterms.
Since Schumer and the Democrats lack the voters to defeat Kavanaugh outright, the left settled on trying to kill nomination through death by a thousand cuts.
Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat Diane Feinstein sent a letter to the National Archives demanding millions of documents dating from Kavanaugh’s time as Personal Secretary in the Bush administration.
The position of Personal Secretary only manages the flow of paper in the Oval Office, so rarely would Kavanaugh have put his own thoughts and opinions in writing, but Democrats hoped that by bogging down the confirmation process under a mountain of documents, it would amp up pressure on moderate Republicans to turn against Trump’s nominee.
But the strategy officially failed when David Ferriero – the head of the National Archives – informed Schumer that under the Presidential Records Act, the Archives could only respond to a document request from a Committee Chair.
“In our conversation, you noted that the minority staff of the Judiciary Committee believe that the special access section of the PRA could be interpreted to include requests from the ranking minority member. You then asked if I would seek a new interpretation of this provision,” Ferriero wrote in response to the Democrats document request.
Ferriero then rejected Schumer’s request by informing him, “[it]must be from the chair (or the committee itself), unless specifically delegated by the committee to the ranking minority member.”
Feinstein responded by basically whining that the National Archives following the law was unfair.
“Your unduly restrictive reading of the law results in one political party having complete control over what records the Senate will be able to see,” the California Democrat wrote.
Feinstein continued that “a biased denial of document requests to one half of the Committee is unsupported by the law.”
The letter from the National Archives drives the final nail in the coffin of the Democrats strategy to stop Kavanaugh.
They couldn’t defeat him outright, so they sought to delay the confirmation and hoped a scandal would emerge or at least would keep him off the bench before the Supreme Court’s new term starts October 1st.
But Republicans had pledged to defeat any attempts to string along the Kavanaugh confirmation by promising to hold the vote as close to Election Day as possible in order to inflict the maximum amount of political pain on the Democrats.
In 2016, voters who put the Supreme Court as their top issue overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump.
So this is friendly political ground for the Republicans this election season.
They were more than happy to engage the Democrats in this battle, but the Democrats just played their last card and their strategy went bust.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle.
