WASHINGTON — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday began with a bang, as Democrats moved angrily to adjourn to consider newly released documents and protesters screamed in support. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called it “mob rule.”

Republicans hoped to use the hearings as an opportunity to extol the experience and distinguished résumé of Kavanaugh, a Washington federal appeals court judge, as well as his advocacy for women in the judiciary and aversion to government regulations.

Democrats were expected to aggressively press Kavanaugh on his positions on Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights case in 1973, the scope of executive power, health care, gun control and same-sex marriage.

Roe v. Wade: Setting the table for the nominee

One of the biggest points of tension in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will be Kavanaugh’s response to Democrats’ questions about whether he believes certain cases — notably Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion — have been correctly decided.

In his opening statement, Sen.Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Judiciary Committee chairman, laid the groundwork for Kavanaugh to refuse to answer by invoking what has come to be known as the “Ginsburg rule,” after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was appointed by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

Declaring that it would be “unfair and unethical” for the judge to answer questions about specific cases, Grassley said: “It’s my advice to him to follow the example set by Judge Ginsburg,” adding that “a nominee should offer no hints, no forecasts, no views.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said a dissent from Kavanaugh opened a window on his views on abortion, one she said indicated that he would not support the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.

Last year, Kavanaugh said that allowing an undocumented teenager in federal custody to obtain an abortion was “based on a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong: a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.” He said he would have given the government more time to find a sponsor for the teenager.

But Kavanaugh did not join a separate dissent from Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who wrote that the teenager had no right to an abortion because she was not a citizen and had entered the country unlawfully.

Guns rights and the law: A potential flash point

Feinstein is one of the most ardent supporters of gun restrictions in the Senate, and in her opening statement she forecast that she intended to grill Kavanaugh about what she regarded as his “out of the mainstream” views on gun rights.

She was referring to a dissent Kavanaugh wrote in a case challenging a District of Columbia law that required gun owners to register their weapons, and banned possession of semiautomatic rifles.

The appeals court upheld the limits as constitutionally permissible under the Second Amendment. But in his dissent, Kavanaugh argued that a ban on semiautomatic rifles should be unconstitutional because they “have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting and other lawful uses.”

For the senator, the issue of gun violence is personal. She became mayor of San Francisco more than 40 years ago when Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, an openly gay politician, were shot and killed.

In her opening statement, she noted that President Trump had promised that whomever he nominated to the Supreme Court would be “anti-choice and pro-gun,” adding, “We believe what he said.”

Executive power and the fate of the Mueller investigation

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Kavanaugh’s still-hidden White House records could be particularly illuminating on a question of pressing urgency: understanding his views on the scope of executive power — and, in particular, whether sitting presidents should be immune from legal process, like subpoenas to testify in a criminal investigation — while they are in office.

Kavanaugh came up in Washington conservative legal circles as a prosecutor working for Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. But later, in a speech he made at a law school after serving in President George W. Bush’s White House and then becoming a judge, he said that the distraction of preparing for questions by criminal investigators would make a president do a worse job, so presidents should be excused from that burden until after they leave office.

His remarks were ambiguous: he said Congress should consider enacting a statute granting presidents temporary immunity while in office, which could suggest that the Constitution does not grant presidents that authority on its own. Still, he clearly indicated that he sympathizes with the idea that being subjected to legal process burdens a president’s ability to carry out his constitutional responsibilities. And the Supreme Court has never decided whether a president can be forced to testify in response to a subpoena — something that it may address if Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Trump’s campaign ties to Russia, were to subpoena him.

Against that backdrop, Leahy said Kavanaugh’s “expansive view of executive power and executive immunity” may have intrigued Trump, while also noting that the president over the weekend attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for permitting the Justice Department to indict two Republican congressmen before the midterm election.

“You’ve taken the unorthodox position that presidents should not be burdened with a criminal or civil” complaint and have “declared in the last 24 hours that the Department of Justice shouldn’t prosecute Republicans. Now, it’s — it’s Alice in Wonderland. And I find it difficult to imagine that your views on this subject escape the attention of President Trump, who seems increasingly fixated on his own ballooning legal jeopardy.”

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., picked up that line of attack, then amplified it.

Durbin focused on what he said were convenient inconsistencies in Kavanaugh’s views on whether sitting presidents can be questioned in criminal investigations. As a lawyer working for Starr, Kavanaugh urged his superiors to question Clinton in graphic detail.

After serving as Bush’s staff secretary, though, Kavanaugh’s views evolved.

“I believe that the president should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” he wrote in 2009 in the Minnesota Law Review. Among those burdens, Kavanaugh wrote, were responding to civil lawsuits and criminal charges.

Durbin said Kavanaugh’s revised position was one that could only please Trump.

Kavanaugh’s views on Bush-era torture policies remain a closed book

Durbin invoked the recent death of Sen. John McCain to raise one of the issues the Judiciary Committee cannot explore because the Judiciary Committee has not been given Kavanaugh’s writings as White House staff secretary to Bush: what he wrote, if anything, about a December 2005 signing statement in which Bush claimed a right to override a torture ban championed by McCain.

“After we passed it 90-9, a veto-proof margin, President Bush issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore the law that John McCain just passed in Congress,” Durbin said. “When we met in my office, you acknowledged that you worked on that signing statement, yet we have been denied any document disclosing your role or your advice to President Bush. I asked you if you wrote, edited or approved documents about these and other issues while you were staff secretary, time and again you said, ‘I can’t rule it out.’ Judge Kavanaugh, America needs to see those documents.”

Emails disclosed last year during the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, another Bush administration veteran, revealed that there had been a high-level internal fight about what the signing statement on the torture ban should say. But those emails did not show how Kavanaugh eventually presented the matter to Bush.

Other former White House staff secretaries have said that a typical task for the person in that role, in a case where a president’s advisers disagree about a document being presented for his signature, is to write a cover memo explaining the issues.

Confirmation hearings open with a verbal brawl

The moment Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing opened, Democrats and protesters turned it into a verbal brawl. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., immediately interrupted Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanding a delay to consider tens of thousands of pages of documents released Monday — the night before the hearing and a holiday.

Other Democrats backed her, especially the senators considering a run for the White House in 2020, as did women’s rights protesters, several of whom were arrested and thrown out as they decried the sessions as a sham.

“We cannot possibly move forward, Mr. Chairman, with this hearing,” one of the presidential aspirants, Harris, declared.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the hearing “a charade and a mockery.”

“What are we trying to hide? Why are we rushing?” asked Leahy.

As the Democrats spoke, activists were dragged, shouting, one by one out of the hearing room. “We dissent! Vote no! Vote no!” one cried.

Grassley argued that the committee has received “more materials on Judge Kavanaugh than we have had on any Supreme Court nominee in history.”

He said Republican aides have already reviewed the 42,000 documents that arrived Monday night. “That’s no reason to delay the hearing.”

Democrats quieted down — temporarily — and the hearing appeared to be getting underway with Kavanaugh introducing his family — including his wife, his parents, an aunt and uncle and cousins.

But as soon as he finished, Democrats renewed their request to delay the hearing.

An inauspicious beginning

Even the lawmakers present acknowledged that there had never been such a contentious opening to a hearing for a nominee for the Supreme Court.

“This is something I’ve never gone through before in 15 Supreme Court nominations,” said Grassley, before explaining the procedures of the hearing to Sen. John Kennedy, a freshman senator from Louisiana.

Cornyn called it “mob rule.”

And the chaos in the hearing room showed no signs of stopping — a steady stream of protesters interrupted Republican senators, and were led out by Capitol Police.

“I wish I didn’t have to put up with this kind of stuff,” Sen. Orrin Hatch said as one yelling protester was escorted out.

Each member on the committee has 10 minutes to give a statement, before Kavanaugh is introduced by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state; and Lisa Blatt, a self-described “liberal Democrat and a feminist” lawyer who has advocated Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The hearing will adjourn after Kavanaugh’s statement. On Wednesday and Thursday, the senators will have 50 minutes each to question Kavanaugh. Among those dragged out of the hearing room: Linda Sarsour, the prominent Palestinian rights advocate and an organizer of the Women’s March.

About those documents (and those still private)

The fight over records concerning Kavanaugh came as no surprise to Senate Republicans. Some of them, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, feared in July — when Trump was choosing among the finalists — that Kavanaugh’s enormous paper trail could stall his nomination

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin wrote at the time that McConnell made clear in multiple phone calls with Trump and the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that Kavanaugh’s paper trail would pose difficulties for his confirmation.

Because the number of pages ran into the millions, McConnell said they could hand Senate Democrats an opportunity to delay the confirmation vote until after the new session of the Supreme Court began in October.

Democrats focused intensely on the amount of information they say is being withheld from them about Kavanaugh’s work in the White House under Bush.

Thousands of pages of records have not yet been made public, and Friday the Trump administration asserted executive privilege and refused to release more than 100,000 pages of records about Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House.

An additional 42,000 pages of documents were released the night before the hearing, noted Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, who raised complaints about the timing.

A press officer for the committee, responding via the committee’s Twitter account a few hours later, said the majority staff had “completed its review of each and every one of these pages.”

Protests outside the chamber — and in

About a dozen women, dressed in red robes and white bonnets in the fashion of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” stood silently, as if in prayer, outside the hearing room.

In the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, just off the hearing room, over 250 activists from women’s rights groups held a vigil in protest, sharing stories underscoring the importance of reproductive rights. They were joined by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat, who gave brief remarks, and they gave a thunderous cheer when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., joined them and took pictures with enthralled fans.

Inside the chamber, protesters were arrested one by one, leaving once-coveted seats in the hearing room empty.

The Women’s March took credit for the protests and said more than 30 women have been arrested so far. (So have a few men.)

“Women are disrupting this hearing today because our lives are at risk,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, chief operating officer of the Women’s March, said in an emailed statement. “Women will die if Kavanaugh is confirmed.”

One protester, referencing the withholding of records relating to Kavanaugh, offered what was perhaps the day’s most unusual shout: “I had to have a background check to work in a laundromat!”

Merrick Garland redux

Democrats, pressing for a delay in the confirmation hearing repeatedly spoke of Judge Merrick B. Garland.

Garland was nominated by President Barack Obama for the Supreme Court to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, but Republicans refused even to meet him, much less grant him a confirmation hearing.

“I think you have to understand the frustration on this side of the aisle,” said Feinstein. “Understand where we’re coming from. It’s not to create a disruption.”

Even Kavanaugh, in an excerpt from his prepared remarks released by the White House on Tuesday morning, raised Garland’s name, praising his colleague on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“I have served with 17 other judges, each of them a colleague and a friend, on a court now led by our superb chief judge, Merrick Garland,” Kavanaugh said.

Scalia’s seat was ultimately filled by Gorsuch.

Democrats have 2020 in mind

For Democrats on the committee with possible presidential aspirations — including Sens. Harris, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — the televised hearings offer an opportunity for combative questioning that can fuel both viral clips and material for a 2020 campaign.

It is unclear how much Feinstein will attempt to direct the questioning from members of her own party. As the Senate’s most ardent proponent of gun restrictions, she is expected to grill Kavanaugh on a 2009 dissent in which he argued against banning semiautomatic weapons.

Feinstein, who was the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when it conducted an investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, may also pursue her own line of questioning over Kavanaugh’s time as an associate White House counsel — especially his offer to help a senior administration official prepare testimony about the government’s surveillance of conversations between certain terrorism suspects and their lawyers.

That offer, revealed in a trove of documents released ahead of the confirmation hearing, contradicts Kavanaugh’s 2006 testimony, in which he told lawmakers he was “not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants.” Democrats have charged that the statement, made in a White House email, was a lie, although it is unknown if Kavanaugh actually provided assistance.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Adam Liptak and Charlie Savage © 2018 The New York Times