Democrats on Thursday grilled Brett Kavanaugh over newly released emails on abortion and race during his Senate confirmation hearing after a tense partisan fight over the public release of the documents.

Under questioning by senators, Kavanaugh, the conservative federal appeals court judge selected by President Trump for a lifetime post on the high court, also stressed the authority of the judiciary to check the power of the presidency.

In a 2003 email, Kavanaugh suggested striking a line from a draft opinion piece that had stated “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land,” saying that the Supreme Court could overturn it.

“I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

He was likely referring to then-Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, who had all dissented in a 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Asked about that document, Kavanaugh said he suggested the change because he thought the draft language was overstating the thinking of legal scholars at the time.

He again declined to say whether the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, Roe v. Wade, was correctly decided, though he indicated — as he also had on Wednesday — that it is a decision that merits respect as “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that has been “reaffirmed many times.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) focused on an email that he said described Kavanaugh’s views as a Bush White House aide on the use of “racial profiling” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda Islamist militant group.

In the 2002 email, Kavanaugh said that although he favored race-neutral policies in policing, there was an “interim question of what to do before a truly effective and comprehensive race-neutral system is developed and implemented.”

Kavanaugh also wrote in a 2001 email that some Transportation Department affirmative action regulations used “a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside.”

The emails made public Thursday dated from Kavanaugh’s service in the White House under Republican President George W. Bush more than a decade ago.

Democrats had objected to an earlier decision by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican leadership not to make the emails public, a decision they later reversed.

With Reuters