As Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings resumed on Thursday, with an astounding volume of his record still held under lock and key by Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, Senate Democrats finally decided that they'd had enough. New Jersey's Cory Booker announced that he would release a set of Kavanaugh emails that Republicans had deemed "committee confidential": available to senators, but withheld from public scrutiny and not available for discussion in open session. The penalty for this act, as Texas' John Cornyn quickly noted, is steep: expulsion from the Senate. Booker's response was, literally, "Bring it."

I hope that they will bring charges against us. I am ready to accept the full responsibility for what I have done—the consequences for what I have done. I stand by the public's right to have access to this document and know this nominee's views on issues that are so profoundly important: race and the law, torture, and other issues.

In the emails, Kavanaugh—then a lawyer in the Bush White House—derisively referred to certain affirmative action regulations as a "naked racial set-aside," and said he had "no doubt" that the Supreme Court's conservative bloc would act swiftly to strike them down. If you're looking for a window into the nominee's personal views on the subject, this is about as close as it gets.

Booker wasn't the only one. "All of us are ready to face that rule," declared Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal. Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono announced that she, too, would release some "committee confidential" records in which Kavanaugh expressed hostility to affirmative action programs for native Hawaiians, challenging any Republican to make the case that the records actually merited such treatment. Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar voiced her support for Booker, calling on Grassley to expedite the review of every document his office has hidden before allowing a vote to take place. "Let's jump into this pit together," said Illinois' Dick Durbin. "If there is going to be some retribution against the senator from New Jersey, count me in. I want to be part of this process."

Democratic legislators were not the only source of Grassley's unauthorized disclosure-related angst. Earlier that morning, the New York Times published "secret emails" provided by an "unknown person" in which Kavanaugh, in 2003, discussed freely in private a subject on which he has demurred in public: his stance on a woman's right to choose.