Brett Kavanaugh will probably be confirmed to the Supreme Court.

I don’t say that lightly.

The events of the past two weeks have been one of those moments of collective consciousness that seem to transcend the boundaries and bubbles of American life. Last Thursday, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford delivered her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee — when she described her sexual assault at the hands of the Brett Kavanaugh — I was riding the MBTA with commuters who were watching the broadcast on their smartphones. Some of them were crying.

The next day, while out of town for work, I sat in a municipal parking area in northern rural Vermont listening to my car radio as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send the Kavanaugh nomination to the Senate. A red station wagon parked near me also contained listeners. It was a warm, sunny day. Our windows were rolled down. I could hear Chuck Grassley’s voice echoing across the parking lot.

The Kavanaugh hearing is far more than just a “job interview,” as many are glibly calling it. It's a national reckoning with unchecked predatory behavior by men with power. It’s the logical escalation of the #MeToo movement’s incursion into American politics — an ecosystem that's overpopulated by self-satisfied men who hail from Ivy League universities, prep schools and other breeding grounds where accountability for morally despicable behavior is more of an abstract concept than a standard practice.

And yet, for all the public anger and disgust that Kavanaugh’s nomination has inspired, it’s very likely that the Republican Party leadership will shoehorn him into the Supreme Court anyway. This will compromise the perceived integrity of the court by shoving it to the right, politically speaking. (It was already starting to lean right before Kavanaugh stepped into the picture.)

This leaves America in a demoralizing predicament. Even if Democrats and independents manage to win control of Congress and the White House by 2020 — an increasingly likely outcome — the legacy of Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party will survive in the Supreme Court.

A right wing court is likely to crush most legislative attempts to steer America down a more progressive and restorative path. Forget single payer health care, transgender rights, criminal justice reform and of course, upholding Roe v. Wade — Kavanaugh and his fellow conservative justices will have the power to shoot those dreams down, no matter what the wider voting public thinks about them.

This forecast might sound like the end of the world to Americans who oppose the Kavanaugh nomination, but in fact, there’s a pretty simple fix that hasn’t yet been seriously discussed in mainstream political forums.

That solution is court packing: that rarest of moments when the president and Congress decide to add seats to the Supreme Court.