And if we reward this, it is the end of good people wanting to be judges. It is the end of any concept of the rule of law. It’s the beginning of a process that will tear this country apart.”11
Two hours into the committee meeting, Senator Coons delivered his prepared statement.12 He addressed all the members of the committee, but he had a specific target in mind—Jeff Flake. Before the hearings the day before, he said, he had prayed for Christine Blasey Ford, for Brett Kavanaugh, and for everyone involved in the process. After the committee’s failure to handle the difficult situation creditably, he said, he was now praying for the nation. Coons insisted that the release of Ford’s allegation to the press—for which he offered no explanation except to say that it was not the work of Senator Feinstein or her staff—was free of partisan taint, and he argued that an additional FBI investigation, limited to one week, would not occasion undue delay but would get to the bottom of the remaining questions about Ford’s allegations and perhaps others—even those of “varying credibility.” He closed by reminding Senator Flake of his continued concerns about the scope of executive power, and he warned that, after the previous day’s “testimony full of rage and partisanship and vitriol,” confirming Kavanaugh without a bipartisan investigation of the allegations would undermine the legitimacy of the Court, placing “an asterisk” after Kavanaugh’s name.
When Coons completed his speech, Jeff Flake left the room, motioning for Coons to follow him. White House observers watching on C-SPAN were texting frantically to figure out what was going on.
Over the next two hours, most of the dais cleared as senators vying for Flake’s ear began collecting in the anteroom, an L-shaped space off of the Democrats’ side of the hearing room with a small conference table and a lavatory. In the narrow corridor sloping down from the anteroom to the hallway is a booth for making private telephone calls.
The anteroom and corridor were so crowded with dozens of senators and staff members that the door from the hallway could not be opened, and the room became unbearably hot. A few noted with amusement that the senators were crammed into the corridor while the staff sat around the conference table, but the senators kept pairing off and retreating to the corridor for private conversations, displacing the staff who were there. Hatch and his counsel were in the lavatory on the phone with the American Bar Association, trying to sort out the confusion caused by its president’s anti-Kavanaugh letter. Coons had cornered Flake, trying to convince him to demand a supplemental investigation in exchange for voting the nomination out of committee.
In the epic, hours-long fight outside the meeting room, fistfights nearly broke out. One senator told another that he wanted to wring his neck. A staffer who was bringing lunch to her hungry boss found herself in the middle of the scrum, with Ted Cruz inadvertently standing on her foot and Sheldon Whitehouse spraying her with saliva as he debated a colleague. More staffers were huddled in the hallway outside as savvy reporters started to realize where the action was. Every few minutes a senator would suggest clearing the area of staffers, since the fighting between senators was getting so personal, but the configuration of the anteroom and the large number of senators and staff made that impossible. Veteran staffers had never seen anything so chaotic in the Senate.
Republican senators felt that Democratic senators had not been honest, and they were livid that Feinstein had not followed the rules for dealing with anonymous allegations. Nobody admitted leaking to the press, but clearly someone had. According to Ford’s own testimony, only her lawyers and Democratic members of Congress had seen the letter, but her friends also would have known the nature of the allegations. Whoever the leaker was, he or she had ensured that Ford’s claims would be addressed in the most public and sensationalized manner possible, despite Ford’s own stated wishes for privacy and confidentiality.
Even though Feinstein was a staunch liberal, her Republican colleagues trusted her to play by the rules, in contrast to some of the other Democrats on the committee. Some senators and aides believed that the eighty-five-year-old Feinstein’s lucidity declined as the day progressed, an observation others strongly disputed. Either way, the consensus was that her staff took advantage of the situation and used her as a shield while they skirted the rules. The failure to handle the allegation