Sen. Merkley files lawsuit to halt Kavanaugh nomination

WASHINGTON, D.C.– The day before Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and one of his accusers, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, give their public testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is going a different route.

Announced Wednesday morning, Sen. Merkley, a Democrat, is filing a lawsuit asking the federal courts to put a hold on the process of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. His reasoning – the Trump administration has withheld parts of Mr. Kavanaugh’s record and have “violated the constitutional separation of powers” by doing so.

Sen. Merkley added that due to this withholding, senators have not been able to act fully on their “constitutional duty of advice and consent” to the President’s nominee. The senator ask that Kavanaugh’s full record be released to the public.

“We are asking for the documents that the president has blocked us from examining to be delivered to the Senate so they can be fully examined,” he said. “We can examine the record of this individual, the public can examine the record and we can fulfill our constitutional responsibility.”

In the lawsuit, it emphasizes there have been three acts of direct interference by the Trump administration to conceal what’s described as “vast troves of documents.”

Those three acts are listed below:

The Defendants conspired to conceal from the Senate and public all of the documents from Kavanaugh’s three most formative professional years, as Staff Secretary in the George W. Bush White House.
The Defendants conspired to conceal 100,000 documents from Kavanaugh’s time of service as a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush. The Defendants empowered Mr. William Burck, a partisan lawyer with profound conflicts of interest, to utilize executive privilege on behalf of President Trump to block Senate access to the relevant documents.
The Defendants conspired to further limit access to documents by utilizing the services of William Burck to label 141,000 pages “Committee Confidential,” limiting the ability of Senators to speak about them and to communicate with experts and members of the public about the contents.

According to a NBC report, more than 260,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents have been made public. There has been no word yet on whether or not a federal judge will accept the lawsuit.