It wasn't exactly the chaos that erupted on Capitol Hill, but protesters in Harrisburg were doing their level best Tuesday to send a message to U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey: Vote against the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Tuesday was a voting day. So, Toomey, of course, wasn't around to hear from the knot of about a dozen members of the "Tuesdays with Toomey" group who gathered, as they do every Tuesday lunchtime on the steps of the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, to register their displeasure with the Pennsylvania Republican.

But that wasn't the point.

Their message was the point.

And the message this Tuesday was among their more urgent: Voting to confirm President Donald Trump's nominee to the nation's highest court was a vote against better healthcare; it was a vote to whittle away or to repeal Roe v. Wade; it was a vote to expand, rather than constrict, executive power.

And, more importantly, confirming Kavanaugh, who opposes investigations of the president, could well short-circuit Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election.

"We want to make sure he hears our voices," Kadida Kenner, of the advocacy group Why Courts Matter, said as the group prepared to deliver a letter, calling on Toomey to halt the confirmation process, to the senator's offices atop the federal building.

Their actions came amid a riotous first day of hearings in Washington D.C., where Democrats, outraged over a 42,000 page document dump of Kavanaugh's tenure in President George W. Bush's White House, tried to put the brakes on the proceedings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Protesters, mostly women, heckled the senators. And opening remarks by Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, were delayed by 90 minutes amid the bedlam, The Washington Post reported.

Toomey doesn't serve on the Judiciary Committee, which means he has no vote on whether to send Kavanagh's nomination to the Senate floor, his spokesman, Steve Kelly, said. But the Lehigh Valley legislator has previously said he planned to "enthusiastically vote" to confirm the federal appellate judge.

Heading into Monday's hearings, public support for Kavanaugh's nomination was evenly split, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week. That's among the lowest support for a high court nominee since 1987.

And some activists are hoping that Kavanaugh will suffer the same fate as the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, whose high court nomination collapsed in the face of similar opposition some 30 years earlier.

Watch the video:

Tuesdays with Toomey rally against Judge Brett Kavanaugh at the federal building in Harrisburg Posted by PennLive.com on Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Micah Sims, of the good government group Common Cause, said Tuesday that senators hadn't had enough time to comb through the tens of thousands of pages made public late Monday and that it was unfair for the hearings to move ahead until they had.

Amber Blaylock, a protester from Harrisburg, said she was concerned about Kavanaugh's stand on rights for the disabled. In one key case, Kavanaugh ruled against additional safeguards when disabled people undergo surgery - even abortion - without their consent.

Kenner isn't under any illusions about changing Toomey's mind on Kavanaugh. Still, he "has to listen to his constituents sometime."

And if he doesn't?

"We're going to make his life miserable - just as we have every Tuesday for the last 80 weeks," she said.

In a statement, Toomey's office said it "takes into account the views of his constituents, regardless of whether he agrees, and hopes the discourse is civil, truthful, and designed to make progress."