Orrin Hatch: “No one before this nominee, to my knowledge--and I believe I am accurate, and we have checked it--no one has ever asked…”

“No one before this nominee, to my knowledge--and I believe I am accurate, and we have checked it--no one has ever asked for appeal recommendations, certiorari recommendations, and amicus curiae recommendations. The reason they never have is that it is--I will use the term--despicable to ask for them because they know they cannot be given; that no self-respecting Attorney General or President would allow that to happen because that is a direct intrusion into the deliberative process of the Solicitor General's Office, the attorney for the people. Nobody else has ever done that before. So we have to ask, why is it being done? And why would seven former Solicitors General, four of whom are Democrats, come out and say this cannot be done? Because they are right and my colleagues on the other side are wrong. They know they are wrong. I think that was geared to try to create a red herring issue so they could say, oh, my goodness, we do not know enough about him. It took them 505 days to hold a hearing. I presume in that 505 days, knowing how the Judiciary Committee works--and I really know how it works--every Democrat staffer assigned to that was going through every document this man has ever had anything to do with. They scrutinized him like they scrutinize any criminal, and certainly he is not that. But they scrutinized him. That is not a bad thing. I am not criticizing them for that. They know everything about Miguel Estrada that is knowable, and there is a lot.…”