The Kavanaugh hearing

Our live coverage of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing has ended. Visit CNNPolitics to read more or scroll through the posts below.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 6, 2018 in Washington, DC.

This week’s hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh consisted of introductions, questions from senators and testimonies from witnesses. But what happens next?

Here’s a look at the next steps in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process:

The confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh concluded Friday afternoon, following days of questions from senators and testimonies.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, ended the hearing with some searing words to Watergate-era White House counsel John Dean.

Here’s that exchange:

Dean then explained how he tried to end “the cover-up” and offered to send Kennedy a copy of his book, which he said detailed his actions.

Watergate-era White House counsel John Dean said Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony doesn’t reveal if the judge thinks US v. Nixon was correctly decided. 

In response to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Dean noted that Kavanaugh lauded the ruling “in the context of a judge needing a backbone, he didn’t say it was rightly decided, and he repeated that several times during the hearings, so I don’t think he has informed this committee of his real position on that very important case.”

One of the witnesses to take the stand on Day 4 of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing was Aalayah Eastmond. Eastmond is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and is a survivor of the mass shooting at the school took that the lives of 17 people.

Eastmond recounted her experience from that day, and how she hid under the dead body of a classmate to remain out of view from the shooter.

Read an emotional exchange between Eastmond and Sen. Richard Blumenthal:

Only five senators attended the testimony of a Parkland shooting survivor who spoke about her concerns about Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

In her testimony, Parkland shooting survivor Aalayah Eastmond recalled details about the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

Sens. Chuck Grassley, Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker, Mike Lee and John Kennedy sat and listened to her testimony, which drew applause from those in attendance.

She also criticized Kavanaugh and his reaction to Fred Guttenberg, the father of a slain Parkland student who tried to give him a handshake earlier this week.

“As you make your final decision, think about it as if you had to justify and defend your choice to those who we lost to gun violence,” Eastmond testified at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.

Guttenberg accused Kavanaugh of ignoring him as he tried to shake his hand. Sources close to Kavanaugh pushed back saying the nominee had no idea who Guttenberg was and that security intervened to end the exchange.

Eastmond also expressed concerns about Kavanaugh’s opinions on assault weapons and said too many dangerous people have access to those guns and use them to terrorize Americans.

What Kavanaugh has said: In 2011, Kavanaugh dissented from a majority opinion of the DC Circuit that upheld a ban that applied to semiautomatic rifles in the District of Columbia.

In his dissent, he wrote that the Supreme Court had previously “held that handguns – the vast majority of which today are semiautomatic – are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens.”

 Read her full testimony here.

Watergate era White House counsel John Dean warns that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, “we will have the most pro-presidential powers Supreme Court in the modern era.”  

In prepared testimony, Dean says such a court is “deeply troubling” contemporaneous with a “Republican controlled Congress, which has shown no interest in oversight of a Republican president.”

Warning the Supreme Court will be a “weak check, at best, on presidential powers,” Dean says, “There is much to fear from an unchecked president who is inclined to abuse his presidential powers.” 

He says he can attest to that “from personal experience.” 

Dean tells the committee he is happy to share what he thinks would have happened if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Nixon.

Dean also goes through Kavanaugh’s past statements and writings on whether a president can be indicted while in office, and finds, “under Judge Kavanaugh’s view, even if a president shot someone in cold-blood on 5th Avenue, that president could not be prosecuted while in office. And based on Judge Kavanaugh’s thinking at the time, he would give a president plenty of time to destroy the evidence.”

This morning so far Elizabeth Weintraub who suffers from cerebral palsy testified that she worries if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, he will turn the clock back and take away the rights of people with intellectual disabilities to make decisions for themselves.  

She criticized Kavanaugh’s decision in a case concerning whether DC’s disability services officials needed to determine the wishes of the parent/guardian before authorizing elective medical procedures:

Rochelle Garza, the legal guardian of an undocumented teen who sought access to an abortion last fall while she was in US custody, testified today. 

The teen ultimately prevailed before the DC Circuit but Kavanaugh, a judge on that court, dissented from the opinion.

Garza spoke today of “the pain” that Kavanaugh’s decision caused the young woman. She said Kavanaugh’s decision could have led to a process that “could have taken weeks, and might have forced her to carry the pregnancy to term against her will, particularly because Texas bans abortion at 20 weeks and Jane was already 15 weeks pregnant.”

About 20 women from the Women’s March and for Center for Popular Democracy Action just walked up near the hearing room and they are holding at the security ropes.

They’re standing in a “funeral procession” line wearing all black, including black veils and T-shirts with various messages including, “I am part of the thousands working in the revolution.” Their mouths are covered in black tape, their hands up, and some have written the word “dissent” on their palms.

They are not going inside because they don’t have tickets.