The confirmation hearing [CNN live updates] of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh [SCOTUSblog profile] began Tuesday morning.

In his opening statements [POLITICO trasncript], Kavanaugh began by thanking both the president and the 65 senators he met with over the previous months. He also took time to pay tribute to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the justice Kavanaugh would replace on the Supreme Court if confirmed and the justice under whom Kavanaugh worked as a law clerk. Kavanaugh also noted that in his 12 years serving on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [official website], he authored more than 300 opinions and handled more than 2,000 cases. Kavanaugh then recounted his time as a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School where he was hired by Justice Elena Kagan.

Following his opening statements, Kavanaugh began taking questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democratic members of the Committee argued that the confirmation hearings should be delayed as the National Archives informed [WP reports] the Committee four weeks ago that it would not be able to produce the more than 900,000 requested pages dealing with Kavanaugh’s time as an associate White House counsel for George W. Bush until the end of October. The Democratic members further argued that the confirmation should be delayed as the White House sent another 42,000 pages of information regarding Kavanaugh hours before the confirmation was set to start. GOP members of Committee responded to these arguments by stating that their staff had sufficient time to review the most recent batch of documents.

Democratic Committee members also argued in their calls for a delay that the confirmation hearing was not transparent enough as, on Friday, the White House announced [The Hill report], citing presidential privilege, that it would not release more than 100,000 pages relating to Kavanaugh’s time in the White House. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa denied the Democratic allegations that presidential privilege was raised solely for the purpose of withholding documents and then denied the Democratic requests for adjournment.

A number of protestors were also removed throughout the hearing for excessive shouting and interrupting the proceedings.

Despite the arguments made along party lines at the hearing, Kavanaugh received support in the form of a letter [text] signed by a bipartisan group of Supreme Court litigators who opined that Kavanaugh in “an outstanding jurist” with an “innate sense of fairness.”