Dick Durbin challenges Brett Kavanaugh to suspend his own confirmation hearing

Dick Durbin speaks at Brett Kavanaugh&#039;s hearing.

(Image credit: Screenshot/Twitter/Aaron Rupar)

published 4 September 2018

After the activist fervor that derailed the beginning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing Tuesday subsided, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee finally moved on to delivering their opening statements.

Committee Democrats had called for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the committee chairman, to postpone Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing due to the lack of appropriate time to review several thousand documents related to Kavanaugh's public record, which were released late Monday night. Additionally, they noted, more than 100,000 relevant pages had been blocked from release by the White House, which invoked broad executive privilege. During his opening statement, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) used his time to appeal to the nominee's personal integrity, challenging him that "if you believe that your public record is one that you can stand behind and defend, I hope that at the end of this you will ask this committee to suspend until we are given all the documents, until we have the time to review them."

"What I'm saying to you is basically this," Durbin continued: "If you will trust the American people, they will trust you." Read a primer on Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing — which is expected to last several days — here at The Week.