Mazie Hirono: “It is deeply troubling to have a Supreme Court nominee for a lifetime position who isn't candid with us about the facts…”

“It is deeply troubling to have a Supreme Court nominee for a lifetime position who isn't candid with us about the facts or straight with us about the law. In Garza v. Hargan, he did it again. In that 2017 case, he wrote a dissent in which he misapplied the law and treated the case as if it were about parental consent. It was not. The case, which was about whether a 17-year-old undocumented young woman could be released from immigration custody to have an abortion, did not involve the question of parental consent. But he sat there at his nomination hearing, and when I asked him about it, he said that was a case involving parental consent--a total misstatement of the issue in the case. In that case, this young woman had already received a proper judicial bypass from a Texas judge that allowed her to make her own decisions. So that had nothing to do with having to require parental consent; she had already overcome that. But that wasn't good enough for Judge Kavanaugh. He inserted his own views about legal issues not even present in the case. This is just one example of his outcome-driven approach to important cases before him. At the hearing, I also asked him about the pattern that was revealed in his numerous dissents. In several of those cases, his own colleagues called him out for misrepresenting the facts and the law. Just last year, in United States v.…”