Republicans’ approach to the millions of documents from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s time in the administration of former president George W. Bush has been to do whatever it takes to keep the nomination moving forward swiftly.

The result has been that many documents from Kavanaugh’s White House work — including those from his time as staff secretary, the person responsible for coordinating the flow of paper to the president — are not being reviewed by the Senate at all, and others, from his time in the White House counsel’s office, are being withheld through a process that avoids some of the requirements of congressional requests made under the Presidential Records Act.

Most notably, despite the news that the Trump administration is keeping more than 100,000 pages of documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee based on executive privilege claims, the process being used to provide the documents to the Senate has, thus far, meant that no one actually has had to invoke executive privilege to do so.

Instead, an informal process has operated — involving lawyers for Bush voluntarily turning over documents to the committee after lawyers for President Donald Trump tell them what documents to withhold.

With a Republican majority in the Senate and a majority vote being all that’s required now to confirm Supreme Court justices, the only thing that can stop Kavanaugh from taking retired Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court is Republican senators breaking ranks with their party or Democrats taking control of the Senate before the nomination is voted on. The first looks unlikely currently, and the second, even if it were to happen, would take time.

So, the Republicans’ path for addressing the millions of pages of documents in Kavanaugh’s file is to minimize the size of the file being turned over to the Senate and to move out the ones that are going to be made public quickly. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley’s request for documents, the Bush lawyers’ route for providing them, and the Trump administration’s method of addressing the document request all have advanced those goals.

The first step came from Grassley, who unilaterally limited his committee’s request for documents under the section of the Presidential Records Act that allows congressional access to former presidents’ documents when necessary and under certain conditions. In his July 27 letter to the George W. Bush Presidential Library, which is part of the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), Grassley noted Kavanaugh’s time — from 2003 to 2006 — as staff secretary but only asked for records regarding his time from 2001 to 2003 in the White House Counsel’s Office, as well as records about his nomination to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

The archives’ review — under the Presidential Records Act, a subsequent executive order signed by former President Barack Obama, and regulations — would lead to a determination of what documents the archives would intend to release.

That decision would be followed by an opportunity for the former president — in this case, Bush — and the current president to review the documents and assert executive privilege if they wished. Under the executive order signed by Obama, “If the President decides to invoke executive privilege, the Counsel to the President shall notify the former President, the Archivist, and the Attorney General in writing of the claim of privilege and the specific Presidential records to which it relates. After receiving such notice, the Archivist shall not disclose the privileged records unless directed to do so by an incumbent President or by a final court order.”

In an Aug. 2 letter to Grassley, however, NARA’s general counsel told him the process of NARA’s review of the requested documents — the step before the presidents’ review for privilege claims — wouldn’t conclude until late October.