Advocates ramp up efforts ahead of Kavanaugh hearing

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are ramping up their efforts to get him confirmed ahead of his nomination hearing next week.

Advocates are sending a flurry of letters to the Judiciary Committee pressing senators to support Kavanaugh, who will appear before the panel starting on Tuesday.

Twenty one of Kavanaugh’s former White House counsel colleagues sent a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that while they don’t agree with “every substantive view” of Kavanaugh’s they all “agree that Judge Kavanaugh is superbly qualified.”

{mosads}”He was known among his peers for his wise counsel and advocacy regarding the Presidency’s institutional interests — both enduring interests and those specific to the President we served – within its Constitutional bounds,” they wrote.

Kavanaugh’s time in former President George W. Bush’s White House has come under a microscope in the lead up to his confirmation hearing.

A legal team for Bush has turned over hundreds of thousands of pages from Kavanaugh’s time as a White House lawyer to the committee.

But Democrats want to see documents from the three year period that Kavanaugh served as a staff secretary for Bush. Republicans have refused to request the documents and Democrats are powerless to force them to be turned over on their own.

The nearly two dozen colleagues note that they saw how Kavanaugh handled his roles as a staff secretary and lawyer.

“He was extraordinarily skilled, diligent, and honorable, with a respectful temperament. He demonstrated balance, fairness, careful listening, personal decency and humility, and a gift for unpretentious personal interaction,” they wrote.

In addition to Kavanaugh’s former colleagues, dozens of female staffers from the Bush administration sent a separate letter touting Kavanaugh as a “public servant and as a person.”

“As former colleagues of Brett’s, we know his commitment to equal treatment of women in the workplace and are especially proud of his efforts to encourage and support women lawyers,” they wrote.

The letter from Kavanaugh’s female former colleagues comes as progressives have seized on  concerns that he will help curb or nix the Affordable Care Act and scale back or overturn Roe v. Wade.

In a third letter, Penny Nance, the CEO and President of Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, told Grassley and Feinstein that it “is time to put aside political maneuverings and consider this nominee on his own merits.”

Nance, in her letter, also highlighted Kavanaugh’s hiring of female clerks.

“As you are aware, Judge Kavanaugh employed the first all-female class of law clerks in the history of the D.C. Circuit Court, and more than half of his law clerks have been women. There is no question that his incredible efforts to advance women in the legal field will yield incredible fruit for generations to come,” she said.