I'm Elizabeth Slattery and welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This is a special summer session edition of SCOTUS 101, and today I'm joined by my colleague John Michael Seidler.

And I'm delighted to be here. And in this episode, we're going to talk with a former law clerk to Judge Kavanaugh, Roman Martinez.

But first, a few confirmation-related headlines.

So the New York Times and the Associated Press filed requests under Maryland's public information law.

This is kind of like FOIAs.

To get emails from Brett Kavanaugh's wife's

work email account, Ashley Kavanaugh is the town manager for Chevy Chase Village in Maryland,

and the news sites are looking for emails with words like abortion, liberal, gay, federal

society, and others. I have to say, this is a new low for a Supreme Court confirmation fight.

You know, we're used to mudslinging and pot shots taken at the nominee, going all the way back to

the unsuccessful confirmation of Robert Bork when, you know, reporters were digging through his trash and going to the video store to see what, what movies he was taking out. But going after

the nominee's wife seems like taking this to a new level and not in a good way. So I'm not exactly

sure what they're hoping to find. Do they think there's going to be an email that says something

like, my husband will vote against XYZ if the Federalist Society tells President Trump to

select him? You know, I just, I think that's ludicrous. And particularly if you're familiar with Judge Kavanaugh's record as a judge, anything that's going to come out in an email is really not relevant to the assessment of what kind of justice he's going to be. You know, we've got 300 plus opinions that we can look at. And I think that's what we should be

focused on. Maybe they just need more to read. They do. But along the same lines, Senate Democrats are

still fighting to get as many documents from Kavanaugh's tenure in the Bush White House as they can.

And our colleague Tom Jipping has had a great article on NRO's bench memos talking about their demand for more documents.

In it, Tom points out that a lot of Senate Democrats already announced they would oppose Kavanaugh.

Some even did so before they even knew who Trump would pick.

So slogging through the millions of documents that they requested that have a little bearing

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