Given the fact that he has been nurtured within the wingnut welfare terrarium for his entire public career, and that he has demonstrated in that capacity all the independence of mind of the average Budweiser Clydesdale, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was bound to have some inconvenient documents stored up behind his CV.

One of his previous jobs was as staff secretary to President George W. Bush. This obviously entangled him in the various crimes against the Constitution that took place back then, when the people enabling those crimes never would have dreamed that they would build lucrative media careers denouncing another Republican president, whose rise to power on a surge of xenophobia and angry yahooism is completely inexplicable to them. This is something that Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is eager to explore.

From his op-ed in The New York Times:

The need to vet Judge Kavanaugh’s full record is all the more urgent because the last time he testified before the Senate, he appeared to provide a misleading account of his work in the White House. At his 2006 confirmation hearing, Senator Dick Durbin and I asked about his knowledge of several Bush-era scandals, including warrantless wiretapping, torture and detainee treatment. Judge Kavanaugh testified that he had no knowledge of such issues until he read about them in the newspaper. But a year after his confirmation, press reports indicated that he had participated in a heated discussion in the White House over the legality of detainee policies.

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The fact that a senior official in the Bush White House would be involved in such debates is not surprising. Indeed, Karl Rove recently described Judge Kavanaugh as playing a major role in reviewing and improving practically every policy document that made it to the president. Yet these accounts are impossible to reconcile with Judge Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony. Only with his full records will we know the truth.

Leahy dropped one of the memos we do have about Kavanaugh and torture into the electric Twitter machine Tuesday night, and, as he points out in the Times, a remarkable number of people involved in making this a country that tortures are now sitting on the federal bench—which is to say, one of them, which is too damn many. Now, they want to put one of the people involved in those discussions on the Supreme Court forever. Leahy’s right. We at least should talk about this.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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