While Connecticut Senator (and "phony Vietnam con artist") Richard Blumenthal has promised that "sparks will fly" at Tuesday's marathon confirmation hearing from Trump Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh (this despite the carping of some conservatives over Kav's "insider" status and his close association with former President George W Bush), other Dems have privately complained that there's little they can do to block his nomination.

But this pervasive sense of inevitability didn't stop Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer from making one last grab for publicity as he pushed to delay Tuesday's hearing following the last-minute release of more than 42,000 pages of documents from Kavanaugh's tenure in the Bush Administration, per the Washington Post. The documents, which were released by the National Archives, have been marked "Committee Confidential" - meaning they're only available to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Over the past week, Dems have raised a stink about the White House's decision to withhold more than 100,000 pages of documents from Kavanaugh's tenure. Kavanaugh was appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Washigton DC Circuit by Bush in 2006. Before that, he served in the White House Counsel’s Office from 2001 to 2003 and as staff secretary from 2003 to 2006.

🚨🚨 The Senate was just given an additional 42,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents the NIGHT BEFORE his confirmation hearing. This underscores just how absurd this process is. Not a single senator will be able to review these records before tomorrow. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) September 4, 2018

Republicans know this has been the least transparent SCOTUS process in history and the hearings should be delayed until we can fully review Judge Kavanaugh’s records. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) September 4, 2018

But Schumer's complaints were swiftly put to rest by the Judiciary Committee and its Republican chairman Chuck Grassley, which tweeted several hours later that its staff had nearly finished reviewing the documents.

The Majority staff has now completed its review of each and every one of these pages. Chairman @ChuckGrassley and his team are prepped and ready for Judge Kavanaugh's hearing to begin tomorrow. #SCOTUS https://t.co/jrXRU8QMTg — Senate Judiciary (@senjudiciary) September 4, 2018

To be sure, the committee's ability to pull off this last-minute document dump with impunity doesn't mean the controversy has been put to rest - or that what's expected to be a 17+ hour marathon hearing will be a snoozefest. Rather, one of the most important questions for both Democrats and Republican pertaining to Kav's judicial stance remains unanswered: Would he be willing to overturn SCOTUS precedents opposed by conservatives? And if so, how quickly?

Here's more from WSJ:

With Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings set to begin Tuesday, partisans on both sides are focusing on one of the most consequential questions surrounding his nomination: Whether he would stand firm with precedents set by landmark rulings or be willing to overturn them. Liberals warn that key rulings on abortion, affirmative action and gay rights could be weakened or reversed by a court that leans further to the right. Many conservatives, on the other hand, hope those precedents will be limited by future rulings and eventually crumble, even if Judge Kavanaugh moves carefully rather than tearing through established doctrine. The court sets precedents through its body of rulings. Once the justices decide an issue, lower courts are bound by the Supreme Court’s holding, and the high court itself usually won’t revisit it. But the court on occasion will abandon what it ruled previously.

In other words, while SCOTUS nominees typically avoid explicitly saying how they would rule on certain key issues, it appears that Democrats are throwing this precedent out the window as they try to drum up popular support for Democratic candidates in November. And the notion that Kavanaugh might swiftly move to overturn precedents like Roe V. Wade (though he has reportedly said in the past that he considers Roe "settled law") and other precedents pertaining to issues like the scope of federal agencies' regulatory authority could very well help get out the vote in the midterms.

The importance of the precedent question is magnified by the fact that the Roberts Court has typically been less willing to challenge precedent. According to WSJ, the Roberts Court has overturned landmark cases at a rate of 1 a year, compared with 2 for the Rehnquist Court, and 3 for the Burger and Warren Courts. In a potential sign of what's to come, SCOTUS overturned two precedents during its most recent term, which was also the final term on the bench for Justice Anthony Kennedy - a ruling that struck down a requirement that public union employees to pay their dues, and another that expanded states' ability to collect taxes on e-commerce sales. So far, President Trump’s first high court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, has proven receptive to these types of changes. Gorsuch wrote that he was "pleased" to join Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the sales tax case.

Ironically, should Kavanaugh prove willing to support these types of changes, one of the biggest impediments to overturning precedent on the Roberts' Court could be the chief justice himself.

When Justice Kennedy said that the precedent limiting internet tax collection “becomes further removed from economic reality” every year, the chief justice agreed—but said that wasn’t enough to justify the court’s decision to reverse the precedent, especially since Congress could change the rules if it wanted. "The court should not act on this important question of current economic policy, solely to expiate a mistake it made over 50 years ago," the chief justice wrote.

But in either case, one precedent that could face an immediate threat is a 1997 ruling that expanded the power of government agencies to interpret their own regulations.

Some Supreme Court precedents that could be most immediately vulnerable are lesser-known ones, such as a 1997 case called Auer v. Robbins, which says judges owe deference to government agencies’ interpretation of their own regulations. Conservatives have said that doctrine gives too much unchecked authority to administrative agencies.

The possibility of an activist Supreme Court setting about to rapidly undo a generation's worth of liberal rulings is enough to give Democrats nightmares. But as Kavanaugh fields questions from lawmakers, Republicans are hoping that he will make his intentions clear.