WASHINGTON—It is not often that you see a complete panorama of abject cowardice like you saw on the majority side of the dais of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning. Eleven white men, with the constitutional duty to advise and consent on the nomination of people to be justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, sitting as mute as a row of tombstones, refusing even personally to yield their time to the hired-gun woman who was questioning Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

They let the befuddled—and befuddling—chairman, Chuck Grassley, yield for them, and they let Rachel Mitchell ask their questions, and they sat there, shirkers and poltroons all. They should send their salaries for the day to battered women's shelters in their home states. By 11 a.m., any moral basis for the continued existence of the Republican Party had evaporated. It was striking. The next time that Ben Sasse or Jeff Flake start moaning about how we've all abandoned "civics," their tongues should turn to fire.

It's going to be easy for frustrated conservatives to land on Mitchell, who volunteered to put herself in this impossible position. She was a career sex-crimes prosecutor trying to reverse-engineer her life's work in order to punch holes in the story being told by a woman who was accusing Brett Kavanaugh of having committed one on her person. That can't have been easy. In addition, from the moment she began her opening statement, Dr. Ford stood the committee, the audience, and (I suspect) everyone watching at every kind of electronic remove, on their ears. And she did it with science, and with the memory of cruel and moronic laughter. She did it with the skills and intellect that she had developed through the years, even while the laughter from a horrible night in 1982 still echoed through her life. It was extraordinary testimony.

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As to the science, Dr. Ford's specialty is in research psychology, and, as such, she was able to explain in expert detail how the memory of a trauma can work on a victim through the years. On her memory of the night of the alleged assault, she explained the physiological "fight or flight" reaction: “I was definitely experiencing the surge of adrenaline and cortisol and norepinephrine, and credit that a little bit for my ability to get out of the situation.” She then patiently explained the effect of the "sequelae" of events, and how they have affected the rest of her life. And then she talked about the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is the area of the brain in which memories are formed and stored, and this is where we get to the laughter. In her testimony, Dr. Ford said that it was "indelible" in her hippocampus that, after the assault, she could hear Kavanaugh and his absent friend, Mark Judge, laughing among themselves at what had occurred at that now-infamous party. (The Republican majority is dead-set against having Judge testify under oath.)

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The memory of the laughter was something that made her voice crack again. It transported everybody in the room—and, I suspect, everyone following along at an electronic remove—to those stairs in the middle of the night as a traumatized teenager ran out of a house and tried to get home. For a while, Mitchell tried to make an issue of the fact that Dr. Ford doesn't remember how she got home that night, but that crack in the witness's voice opened a chasm in the fight over this nomination.

And the sight of those 11 white men sitting there, mute as tombstones, abandoning the oaths they took when they became senators, turning their back on their duty and deserting their posts—that's something that's going to stay around for a while, too. For good and all, and for the foreseeable future, the Republican Party abandoned its obligations to the Republic. All those quiet Republican men, they muted the voice of Abraham Lincoln in their party forever.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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