It stands to reason that Senator Schumer wasn’t too concerned about Judge Kavanaugh’s record before he announced his opposition. Why is it so important to Senator Schumer now?
Democratic leaders are demanding access to every page from every email and every paper record from every one of the hundreds of White House aides who came and went during the entire eight years of President Bush’s time in office. This includes records that merely mention Judge Kavanaugh’s name and records he’s never seen. That is not reasonable. As I have made clear, I will not put taxpayers on the hook for a fishing expedition.
.. Judge Kavanaugh’s time as White House staff secretary, a post that manages the paper flow into and out of the Oval Office
.. The staff secretary documents consist largely of materials Judge Kavanaugh didn’t write. They were prepared by policy advisers across the executive branch.
.. The number of pages would range in the millions, an unprecedented document dump that would take well into next year to review. And that’s exactly what Democratic leaders want and have wanted all along.
.. Their objective is to delay the confirmation process until after the midterm elections, with the hope of taking control of the Senate. My Democratic counterpart on the Judiciary Committee’s hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, put it quite succinctly: “Feinstein, other Senate Dems have plan on Brett Kavanaugh nomination: Stall.”
.. So recent complaints from Mr. Schumer and other Democrats about the scope of records requests ring hollow, especially coming from senators who have already declared their opposition to Judge Kavanaugh and initially refused even to meet with him.
Mueller Seeks Interview With Ex-Spokesman for Trump’s Legal Team
Mark Corallo resigned from position after revelation that president’s son arranged meeting with Russian lawyer
Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking an interview with Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team
.. When news of the New York meeting first broke, Mr. Trump Jr. said the participants “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” Emails he subsequently released showed he took the meeting after he was told that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton that was being offered by the Russian government in support of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
.. Mr. Mueller is examining an Air Force One flight that followed initial reports about the Trump Tower meeting during which top White House advisers, including the president, crafted a statement about that meeting
.. in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a book the president has repeatedly attacked. Mr. Wolff wrote that Mr. Corallo quit after “privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice.”
The president’s legal team is also debating whether to allow Mr. Trump to interview with Mr. Mueller, which the president last week told reporters he was “looking forward” to doing.
Yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers have been studying a 1990s federal court ruling that could serve as a basis for delaying, limiting or avoiding an interview with Mr. Mueller
The Senate’s Flawed Health-Care Bill
The Senate Republican health-care bill would not repeal and replace Obamacare. The federal government would remain the chief regulator of health insurance. No state would be allowed to experiment with different models for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Federal policy would continue to push people away from inexpensive catastrophic coverage. The bill also seems unlikely to stabilize insurance markets, even though their current instability is one of the main Republican talking points for passing it. The legislation gets rid of the “individual mandate” — Obamacare’s fines for not buying insurance — but keeps the regulations that made the mandate necessary. The result is likely to be that healthy people leave the market and sick people face much higher premiums.
.. From a conservative perspective, the chief selling point of the bill is Medicaid reform.
.. But the reform is delayed until after the 2024 presidential election.
.. We suspect that the Congressional Budget Office will find that most of the reduction in insurance rolls results from people’s choosing not to buy insurance when they’re not being threatened with fines.
.. The bill’s subsidies for people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer-based insurance system could simply be given to the states to distribute to that population without having to comply with Obamacare’s regulations.