MSNBC "The Beat with Ari Melber" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Sheldon Whitehouse

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

MELBER: As I mentioned, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is here live after a  quite a day. Senator, within these hearings this week, have you seen  anything that you view as disqualifying for Judge Kavanaugh to be elevated  to the Supreme Court?

WHITEHOUSE: Well, he certainly hasn`t lifted any of the clouds of doubt  about his candidacy, particularly that he`s being sent there as the  president specifically said to overturn Roe v. Wade. And second that he`s  being sent there to protect the president from ongoing criminal  investigations.

MELBER: Well, Senator, let`s take each of those. You`ve been pushing hard  questions. And we`re looking at live footage there as the testimony  continues. On Roe, since you mentioned it, do you think he is misleading  your committee when he says it`s a super-precedent based on what the new e- mail reveals?

WHITEHOUSE: I think he`s being very coy and doing his very best to leave  himself room to move to overrule Roe. There is a -- it`s hard to pin him  down on terms, but if you begin with precedent, and then improve to  precedent, on precedent, and then go to settled law, and then finally go to  correctly decided settled law. That`s kind of how the spectrum goes.

And he won`t say that Roe was correctly decided. He will say that Brown v.  Board of Education is correctly decided and he`ll say that other cases are  correctly decided. But he leaves himself that window to overrule Roe and  he has been very slick about dodging around that.

MELBER: Let`s be direct because these things can get rather convoluted.  Senator, are you saying that he is avoiding committing to upholding Roe  because that would ultimately be perjury before the Senate if he then  overturned Roe and made it on the court?

WHITEHOUSE: Well, I think he`s more trying to avoid that in order to give  senators like Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins some room to believe  that he will protect Roe and that they could be surprised later on when he  doesn`t.

MELBER: Do you think he has assured Senator Collins in any meaningful way  that he is pro-choice? Because the balance of what`s happened this week,  and you just went through some of it, seems to suggest more that he is pro- life, which would make sense because the president committed to only  appointing pro-life justices.

WHITEHOUSE: Yes. Well, the question whether he`s pro-choice and whether  he`s pro-life kind of runs beside the question of how he will treat Roe v.  Wade as precedent. And he has gone as far as to say that it is settled  law, but he has also said in that particular e-mail that you mentioned that  settled law can be overturned, all the time by the court. So the magic  words that you`re looking for, that he`s really committed to defending a  particular precedent, are that it is correctly decided --

MELBER: Right.

WHITEHOUSE: -- settled law and he has not been willing to say that. So  he`s leaving himself the opening to go back and overrule Roe v. Wade under  all this pressure that`s suspicious.

MELBER: I hope you`ll forgive me, Senator. Sometimes I say pro-choice  because when we get into what`s correctly decided and the day it was decided, it`s too close to law school and too far from plain language but I 
know what you mean.

I want to turn the other point that you have been pressing and that a lot  of Americans are concerned about and the dovetails with the ongoing scandal  about people inside the Trump administration saying they are concerned  about his fitness for office, which, of course, matches whether there were  crimes committed in the office. Take a listen to Senator Coons who pressed  as you did on these Mueller issues today.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

MELBER: Does that concern you? Why can`t a current Appeals Court judge  simply say that obviously, the president cannot fire the prosecutor  investigating him without cause?

WHITEHOUSE: It would be good if he could say that, but he didn`t. And  that`s, I think, part of the problem. He comes to us with a record that  runs from him saying that you can`t indict a sitting president. And  hypothesizing that United States versus Nixon, the subpoena of the  president case, was wrongly decided, to then, in front of us, saying that  United States versus Nixon is one of the great fore cases of history.

And it`s really hard to work through somebody who has taken such a broad  array of positions on the same issue. And when you try to pin him down, he  just talks about precedent, rather than trying to narrow the range of  arguments that he, himself, has made over time.

MELBER: Senator Whitehouse, I know this is an extraordinarily busy time  for you and your committee. I appreciate you stepping out to speak with us  tonight on an issue that I think concerns a lot of Americans.

WHITEHOUSE: Thanks. Happy to do it.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source