She was not supposed to be on trial, any more than Kavanaugh. She’s a character witness for one of the most powerful jobs on earth. The last-minute cries for due process are a joke. If Republicans wanted the truth, they would have called Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge — a bro buddy, the author of “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” They would have asked for an F.B.I. investigation 10 days ago.

Kavanaugh says he’s appalled that sordid details of one’s past are being used to destroy reputation. Is this the same Kavanaugh who once demanded that the most graphic details of another man’s private life, Bill Clinton, be made public “piece by painful piece”?

When Republicans made this pact with Trump, they did not expect that the lab for long-term governance — elite prep school , Ivy League college and law school, the right mentors, think tank promoters, lawyers and judges — would be shown as an incubator of social pathologies.

What they have now is an immolation of principle. A lifetime of Republican pieties, put forth by the bow-tied best and brightest, has gone up in a poof. Free trade? It’s been swamped by America First. Balanced budgets, living within our means? Get to love the trillion-dollar deficit, courtesy of those tax cuts.

How did the party of family values get behind a self-proclaimed “pussy grabber,” a Senate candidate from Alabama who hits on teenage girls, a Supreme Court nominee who, his friends say, was a mean, aggressive drunk? And how many Trump insiders are now wearing GPS ankle bracelets?

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, complains about Democrats making a mockery of the court confirmation hearing. McConnell, of course, did them one better: he wouldn’t even give President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court a hearing. That’s when the match was lit.

One good thing to come out of this debacle is the shining of a light on the policy shops promoting and protecting their own, the Ivy Leagues and fraternity of connected clerks. The gold standard.