Schumer, Democrats wrestled over staging mass Kavanaugh walkout

I wish they had.


Schumer, Democrats wrestled over staging mass Kavanaugh walkout
The party decided that a made-for-TV moment could backfire, and instead opted for a strategy of maximum disruption.
By BURGESS EVERETT and ELANA SCHOR
09/04/2018 07:40 PM EDT
Updated 09/04/2018 07:59 PM EDT


Hours before Brett Kavanaugh arrived for his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer and frustrated fellow Democratic senators debated staging a mass walkout — or not showing up at all.

For weeks, the party grappled with how to force the release of millions of pages of missing Kavanaugh documents after Republicans spurned their previous attempts. The discussions culminated during a Labor Day conference call: Senators weighed the drastic protest measures but opted against them, worried about what would come next and whether the fallout from a made-for-TV moment would undercut their efforts to defeat the nomination, according to multiple Democratic sources.

The strategy session revealed a divide on the Judiciary Committee between its more aggressive, often younger senators and veterans who prefer to adhere to the chamber’s norms. To bridge that gap, Democrats settled on a middle ground: disruption.

They created a spectacle by hijacking the hearing as soon as it started and calling for the committee to adjourn against a backdrop of liberal activists being arrested in protest. At the same time, opposition lawmakers left themselves room to grill Kavanaugh in the coming days by remaining active participants in the high court hearings.

The compromise still injected a dose of drama in an otherwise rote day of partisan opening statements.