Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the Nation watched the President's outstanding Supreme Court nominee last week, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, testify before the Judiciary Committee.

They saw Chairman Grassley guide the committee with gracious, strong leadership and an incredible amount of patience. The chairman deserves our gratitude, as do all of the committee staff, whose hard work and dedication made it possible for Senators to thoroughly examine Judge Kavanaugh and review more pages of documents pertaining to his career than were produced for the last five Supreme Court nominees combined.

The American people also saw an extensive extremely impressive nominee. Judge Kavanaugh was candid and forthcoming, within the ethical constraints that exist for judicial nominees. He demonstrated the intellectual brilliance and thoughtful temperament for which he is so widely known. He showed exactly why he is universally acknowledged as a leading legal mind and exactly why he will make a phenomenal Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, not everyone performed as admirably or as professionally last week. Some of our Democratic colleagues repeatedly interrupted Chairman Grassley, behaved rudely toward the nominee, and hauled out one dishonest partisan attack after another to try to distort his record and smear Judge Kavanaugh.

Now, this is a nominee who Lisa Blatt, a prominent litigator and self-described liberal Democrat, testified as ``unquestionably qualified by his extraordinary intellect, experience, and temperament.''

This is a nominee who prominent liberal law professor Akhil Amar praised as ``studious and open-minded.'' This left-leaning academic described Judge Kavanaugh's nomination as ``President Trump's finest hour.''

This is a nominee whose record and reputation have revealed Democrats' partisan attacks to be futile and silly and dishonest. At this point, dishonest attacks and half-truths are all that is left for our colleagues who made up their minds long ago that they were going to oppose Judge Kavanaugh no matter what--no matter what.

You don't need to take my word for this. The Washington Post's Fact Checker called out one of our Democratic colleagues and assigned her shameless misrepresentation of Judge Kavanaugh's testimony four Pinocchios--the strongest condemnation. This particular Senator cherry- picked from a sentence where Judge Kavanaugh was paraphrasing one side's argument in a case that came before him, stripped his description of its content, and held up the party's position in that case as though it was Judge Kavanaugh's own personal opinion.

But by trying to slime Judge Kavanaugh, the Democrats are only underscoring one of his most impressive skills--his widely acclaimed talent for thinking through all parties' perspectives and engaging fairly with the full range of views, regardless of his personal beliefs.

This and all other specious attacks that were trotted out said absolutely nothing about Judge Kavanaugh's actual record. They said a great deal about the Senators who were willing to resort to them in order to appease the far-left special interests, but I suspect that everyone who listened fairly to Judge Kavanaugh and the other witnesses came away seriously impressed with his qualifications for the Court, and I look forward to voting to confirm him here on the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

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