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The first day of confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Judge Brett Kavanaugh started with tens of thousands of documents being withheld by the White House over the weekend. Then the actual hearing for Donald Trump's unpopular nominee to fill the seat vacated by U.S. Supreme Court "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy kicked off today with pandemonium from Democratic committee members objecting to the proceedings, and sustained protests in the chamber throughout the day. In other words, just another normal unprecedented day in the U.S. Senate under President Trump. Today we cover the hearing and the havoc with extended audio clips and a conversation with columnist and former Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign writer RICHARD ESKOW, to try to make sense of it all. We discuss whether Democrats should have shown up at all for today's hearings for the longtime Republican Party operative and activist, now a federal judge turned SCOTUS nominee.\xa0 Kavanaugh appears to have lied to the U.S. Senate during his 2006 Senate hearings for the D.C. Court of Appeals, and is now being rammed through in a mad dash by Republicans to seat him with a bare majority before they potentially lose control of the U.S. Senate in the November midterm elections. Should Democrats have even played along with the charade?\xa0 If seated on the GOP's already-stolen U.S. Supreme Court, Kavanaugh will almost certainly reverse decades of hard-fought civil rights victories and more for a generation, and would almost certainly sit in judgement of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the President.\xa0 "It's Alice in Wonderland," said Vermont's Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who has been in the Senate for 44 years:\xa0 "Today, the Senate is not simply phoning in our vetting obligation, we're discarding it. It's not only shameful, it's a sham...\u201d