United States Senate

The United States Senate is the institutional setting for the 2018 confirmation proceedings of Brett Kavanaugh, where Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation became a test of how elected officials would receive testimony, assess evidence, and make a consequential appointment. The book distinguishes the Senate as a whole from the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, which managed negotiations and hearings. It follows the process from a disputed hearing schedule and competing accounts of the events Ford described to a nomination advanced despite her testimony and the public controversy around it.

The Senate as a contested setting

When the nomination hearings began, Democratic senators tried to halt proceedings, arguing that they had not been given access to documents from Kavanaugh’s past. Their effort failed. Demonstrators in the Senate halls interrupted the hearings and were arrested, while Republicans, unified behind Donald Trump’s nominee, denounced the Democrats’ opposition. The hearings therefore opened in an atmosphere where questions about access to information and the fairness of the process were already inseparable from partisan conflict.

The account also places the Senate’s handling of Ford’s allegation against an earlier precedent. Anita Hill, whose testimony during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings had raised questions about workplace harassment, warned that the committee still had no specific protocol for evaluating allegations of sexual harassment or assault against a nominee. Her criticism was not simply about the eventual decision: it concerned the rules under which a witness would be heard. With timing, format, and participation still unsettled, Ford’s team and committee staff were effectively negotiating the terms of the hearing as they went along.

Negotiating the hearing and evidence

Ford’s lawyers rejected the committee’s offers to interview her privately and sought an FBI investigation. The FBI declined, saying that it regarded Kavanaugh’s background check as closed; Republicans on the Judiciary Committee maintained that the committee itself had the authority and ability to investigate. That dispute left the committee’s process, rather than an impartial law-enforcement inquiry, at the center of the effort to evaluate the allegation.

Ford’s lawyers also asked the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, whom Ford identified as present during the incident she described. The committee staff refused to accept a subpoena as a condition of Ford’s testimony. Instead, staff accepted written statements from Judge and P. J. Smyth, another person Ford recalled being at the gathering. Judge acknowledged his high-school friendship with Kavanaugh but said he did not remember the party or seeing conduct of the kind Ford described. Smyth likewise said he did not remember the gathering and had not seen Kavanaugh behave improperly toward women. By relying on statements rather than compelling the two men to testify in person, the committee narrowed the evidence available in the hearing. The book presents the resulting choice as stark: the public was left weighing Ford’s account against Kavanaugh’s denial, without live testimony from those potential witnesses.

The negotiations also exposed a divide over how the Senate should treat Ford’s participation. Her lawyers pressed for a process in which she could testify, while attempting to keep their correspondence collegial. Ford maintained that coming forward was not a partisan act and that she would have spoken up regardless of Kavanaugh’s party. At the same time, Republican committee staff viewed the allegation and the negotiations through the political stakes of a nomination that could be defeated. The account does not make those competing perceptions equivalent to evidence about what happened; it shows how they shaped the setting in which the evidence was considered.

Testimony before the committee

As the hearing approached, Republican senators ceded their questioning time to Rachel Mitchell, an experienced prosecutor. Ford’s preparation took place in a narrow conference room at the Watergate Hotel, where her lawyers drafted an opening statement from the details she had given them and the press. Ford rewrote nearly all of it, explaining that the draft did not sound like her and that she needed to put it in her own language and order. She declined to rehearse answers, confident about what she remembered and what she did not, though she worried about speaking before cameras and had asked why the committee could not question her in a closed hearing.

Ford testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee while senators, the public, and the press watched for weaknesses or inconsistencies. The arrangement put her account into a public, politically charged forum, rather than the private interview the committee had offered. The distinction mattered to the book’s account of the Senate: procedure determined not only who was heard, but the conditions under which testimony would be delivered and scrutinized.

Votes and institutional consequences

On October 5, 2018, the Senate advanced Kavanaugh’s nomination, with a final vote expected the following day. The vote fell on the first anniversary of the publication of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s first Weinstein investigation and close to the second anniversary of the release of the Access Hollywood tape, dates that linked the Senate proceedings in the narrative to the broader public debate over sexual misconduct and accountability. Ford’s lawyer Debra Katz told her that she had done her part, even as it became clear that Kavanaugh was still on course to join the Supreme Court.

The next day, Katz, Lisa Banks, and a junior lawyer went to the Senate building for the final vote, accompanied by Megan Twohey. From the gallery, Ford’s lawyers watched senators frame the stakes in sharply different terms. Many Republicans spoke of the danger that innocent men could be unfairly targeted and characterized Ford as a pawn of those opposing Kavanaugh. Democrats criticized Kavanaugh, praised his accusers, and expressed sympathy for survivors of sexual assault. When Senator Dick Durbin apologized for Ford’s treatment and described her participation as civic duty, Katz was overcome.

Protesters entered the gallery and shouted objections as security removed them; outside the vote, demonstrations and confrontations with Republican senators had made the conflict visible across Capitol Hill. The Senate nevertheless proceeded with the final vote. Its role in the account is therefore twofold: it provided the formal route by which a Supreme Court nominee could be heard and confirmed, and it became a public stage on which disputes over evidence, fairness, partisanship, and the treatment of an accuser were argued. The book’s emphasis falls on that contrast between a process with official procedures and a controversy whose participants did not agree that those procedures had given the allegation a fair hearing.