Wednesday round-up

For The Washington Post, Seung Min Kim reports that [s]enators escalated a bitter dispute over Brett M. Kavanaughs documents yesterday, as Senate Democrats, infuriated with Republicans for requesting only a portion of Kavanaughs records from his tenure in the George W. Bush White House, sent a wide-ranging request demanding that his entire paper trail be provided to Congress. Stephen Dinan reports for The Washington Times that [t]he National Archives on Monday released the first big batch of documents from Kavanaughs time in the independent counsels office in the 1990s, which show Kavanaughs role in negotiating with Congress over what information the independent counsel would make public during its investigation. Also for The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reports that Republicans are ramping up pressure on Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.V., the first Democrat to speak with JudgeKavanaugh, breaking with party leaders who urged a freeze on such meetings. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal remarks that Kavanaughs march to confirmation advanced Monday when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul announced his support.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment. At Take Care, Helen Marie Berg and others document statements showing that the case made for Kavanaugh before the President officially announced the nomination differs markedly from the case made for Kavanaugh after the President officially announced the nomination. In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Patrick Purtill maintains that belief in the broad power of the executive is more deeply rooted in the legislative and judicial branches, who have helped create it, than it is in Kavanaugh. At Real Clear Policy, Adam White writes that on constitutional and regulatory issues, Kavanaugh has become the intellectual leader of his generation of judges on the lower courts, as shown by [t]hose cases in which Judge Kavanaughs analysis was adopted by the Supreme Court even after Kavanaughs colleagues on the D.C. Circuit rejected it.

Briefly:

• At the Harvard Law Review Blog, Guy-Uriel Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer call [t]he Roberts Courts election law jurisprudence a puzzle to scholars of the Court, citing [t]he recent decision inAbbott v. Perezapproving Texass racially discriminatory redistricting plan as another data point that belies the purported aspiration of [t]he conservative Justices to approach their task modestly,invokinganalogies to baseball umpires and the duty to call balls and strikes.
• At Reasons Volokh Conspiracy blog, Will Baude highlights a new law review article co-written with Eugene Volokh in which the two take issue with the courts ruling in mandatory-union-fees case Janus v. AFSCME, arguing that compelling people to give money, by itself, is not a First Amendment problem but is rather akin to taxation.

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