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***Live Updates*** Senators Question Brett Kavanaugh

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Senators will question Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday a day after Democrats and left-wing agitators repeatedly interrupted Tuesday’s hearings. Senators will get 30 minutes to question Kavanaugh in the first round and another 20 minutes in the second round.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for live updates. All times eastern.

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11:10: Leahy implying that Kavanaugh was not truthful in his previous testimony to Congress re: torture. Hatch already allowed Kavanaugh to explain himself. Leahy already salty and curmudgeonly just minutes into his allotted time.

11:15 AM:

10:55 AM: Hatch now asking questions about Judge Alex Kozinski (former Ninth Circuit Judge). Says left playing the “guilt by association” game. vKavanaugh says no woman should be subject to sexual harassment and news about Kozinski’s history of harassment was a “gut punch.” He says he was not on Kozinski’s email list that Kozinski he used to send “inappropriate material.” He says sexual misconduct is a huge national problem and mentions coaches, priests, doctors, judiciary.

10:50: Kavanaugh tells Hatch about his hiring of women/minority law clerks. Says he read Linda Greenhouse’s article about the lack of women law clerks. Says he asked why there was a discrepancy and did something about it.

10:43 AM: Hatch questioning Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh says his loyalty is to the constitution when asked if he could be independent if a case involving Trump comes before him on the Supreme Court. He again cites Hamdan as a case where he ruled against the Bush Administration. Hatch now asking about what role had he had in developing the Bush administration torture policies and says Democrats want “every scrap of paper” to try to find something on Kavanaugh. Hatch says Kavanaugh has a “strong reputation” in the legal community for honesty and wants to give Kavanaugh an opportunity to answer whether he misled the committee in 2006 about Bush administration/torture. He says he was not “read into” those programs and told the whole truth.

10:30 AM: Looks like there won’t be any more loony left-wing agitators!

10:35 AM: Citing the Ginsburg Standard, Kavanaugh says he can’t give Feinstein an answer when she asks whether a sitting president should be required to respond to a subpoena. He says he will not answer hypothetical questions like the other eight Justices on the Supreme Court did not.

10:28 AM: Kavanaugh says the quote Feinstein put up about the Second Amendment may not have been accurate because there were brackets around some of his words. Feinstein now questioning Kavanaugh about his Minnesota Law Review article and puts up a new Kavanaugh quote: “If the President were the sole subject of a criminal investigation, I would say no one should be investigating that.” Kavanaugh says he has not taken a “constitutional position.” Feinstein asks if U.S. v. Nixon was wrongly decided. Kavanaugh says Nixon is one of the most significant Supreme Court cases along with Marbury,  Brown, and Youngstown. He says he thinks Brown was the Supreme Court’s greatest moment.

10:21 AM: Feinstein asks Kavanaugh about Roe, wants to know what he means by “settled law.” Kavanaugh, mentioning stare decisis, says Roe has been “reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years.” Mentions Planed Parenthood vs. Casey and says it becomes “precedent on precedent” because it applied the stare decisis factors and decided to reaffirm it. Feinstein says she doesn’t want to go back to “death tolls in this country” and says women should control their own reproductive systems. Kavanaugh says he doesn’t live in a “bubble” and understands the jurisprudence/real-world impact of abortion cases.

10:10 AM: Feinstein says she wants to talk to him about guns and abortion. She immediately says her office wrote the “assault weapons legislation.” Feinstein asks Kavanaugh about so-called “assault weapons” and “common use.” She says she’s very interested in his views on “assault weapons” after mentioning kids being “mowed down” in school shootings. Feinstein is asking Kavanaugh about his dissent in Heller when he as on the D.C. Circuit. Feinstein says she thinks she and Kavanaugh are on “totally different wavelengths” re: “common use.” Kavanaugh points out that most handguns are semi-automatic and cites Scalia’s opinion and says he was strongly following the Supreme Court’s precedent in Heller/McDonald. Kavanaugh refers to the last few pages of his Heller dissent:

This is a case where emotions run high on both sides of the policy issue because of the vital public safety interests at stake. As one who was born here, grew up in this community in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and has lived and worked in this area almost all of his life, I am acutely aware of the gun, drug, and gang violence that has plagued all of us. As a citizen, I certainly share the goal of Police Chief Cathy Lanier to reduce and hopefully eliminate the senseless violence that has persisted for too long and harmed so many. And I greatly respect the motivation behind the D.C. gun laws at issue in this case. So my view on how to analyze the constitutional question here under the relevant Supreme Court precedents is not to say that I think certain gun registration laws or laws regulating semi-automatic guns are necessarily a bad idea as a matter of policy. If our job were to decree what we think is the best policy, I would carefully consider the issues through that different lens and might well look favorably upon certain regulations of this kind. But our task is to apply the Constitution and the precedents of the Supreme Court, regardless of whether the result is one we agree with as a matter of first principles or policy. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 420-21 (1989) (Kennedy, J., concurring) (“The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result.”). A lower-court judge has a special obligation, moreover, to strictly and faithfully follow the lead of the “one supreme Court” established by our Constitution, regardless of whether the judge agrees or disagrees with the precedent.

D.C. believes that its law will help it fight violent crime. Few government responsibilities are more significant. That said, the Supreme Court has long made clear that the Constitution disables the government from employing certain means to prevent, deter, or detect violent crime. See, e.g., Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32 (2000); Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004); Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008); District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). In the words of the Supreme Court, the courts must enforce those constitutional rights even when they have “controversial public safety implications.” McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3045 (2010) (controlling opinion of Alito, J.).

As I read the relevant Supreme Court precedents, the D.C. ban on semi-automatic rifles and the D.C. gun registration requirement are unconstitutional and may not be enforced. We should reverse the judgment of the District Court and remand for proceedings consistent with this opinion. I respectfully dissent.

10:02 AM: Kavanaugh says his personal beliefs are not relevant when deciding cases when Grassley asked him for examples where he followed precedent even when it went counter to his personal beliefs. He says precedent is about judicial independence and ensuring predictability. “Foundational to our Constitution,” he says, adding that it is also about “stability.”

9:59 AM: Dems getting ready to get their chance to grill Kavanaugh:

Hillary Clinton weighs in on Kavanaugh. But as Graham said yesterday, you can’t lose elections and pick judges.

9:57 AM: In response to Grassley’s question, Kavanaugh says he has ruled against the the George W. Bush administration that appointed him in administrative law cases, some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases.

9:51 AM: Kavanaugh cites the Korematsu dissent and Justice Robert Jackson’s concurrence in Youngstown as examples of judicial independence as more loony agitators start interrupting. He is now talking about Hamdan v. Rumsfeld as more agitators interrupt. He says he ruled for Hamdan, who was involved in the 9/11 attacks, because “we don’t make decisions based on who people are” and “make decisions based on the law.”

Kavanaugh: “If you walk into my courtroom and have the better legal argument, you will win.”

9:49 AM: Grassley says some of Kavanaugh’s critics have wrongly criticized his views on presidential authority and asks him about what judicial independence means to him as it applies to ruling against the executive branch.

“No one is above the law in our constitutional system,” Kavanaugh says, citing Federalist 69.

9:43 AM: A protester in a wheelchair reportedly got escorted out and claimed they were not working with the Democrats…. right…

9:40 AM: Grassley now starts the questioning. He asks what makes a judge a good one and how he goes about deciding cases. Kavanaugh says it’s “independence” and points to Article III of the Constitution. He says that takes some “backbone” and cites Youngstown Steel and Brown v. Board of Education, United States v. Nixon. Kavanaugh also says “respect for precedent.” He also saying being a good judge means paying attention to words that are written–Constitution, statutes. He now talks about “human qualities” as well and says he is joining a “team of nine” if he is confirmed and says he does not make decisions by himself and learns from other judges when deciding cases. He says he wants the losing party to say “Kavanaugh gave me a fair shake.” Kavanaugh also points out that decisions impact real people and is just not about theory (Klobuchar mentioned something similar yesterday).

9:38 AM: Grassley says Senators will get through their first round of questioning today. Here’s hoping Senators don’t waste time with rambling questions and asked pointed, relevant questions that get to the point and yield the rest of their time instead of yapping for the sake of yapping on camera.

9:35 AM: Kavanaugh takes his seat as Grassley gavels in the hearing. He points out that Democrats interrupted the hearing 63 times as agitators again start screaming and trying to interrupt the hearing as Grassley says that today will be different.

9:25 AM: Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) vowed on Tuesday afternoon to run the committee on Wednesday and not let the Committee run him. “Either you run the committee or it runs you,” Grassley said, signaling that today’s hearings will be much more orderly than Tuesday’s.

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