On September 27th, when Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham delivered a four-minute speech that turned Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation process decisively. An hour earlier, Kavanaugh had delivered a furious, partisan opening statement decrying the sexual-assault allegations against him, which he attributed in part to Democrats seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” but until Graham’s speech it wasn’t obvious that the Republicans were behind him. “Boy, y’all want power! God, I hope you never get it,” Graham seethed at the Democrats across the dais. A minute later, Graham turned toward Kavanaugh, paused, and a strange, provocative exchange unfolded.

“Do you consider this a job interview?” Graham asked.

Kavanaugh began, sounding a bit professorial, “The advise-and-consent role is like a job interview.”

“Do you consider what you’ve been through a job interview?”

“I’ve been through a process of advise-and-consent under the Constitution.”

“Would you say you’ve been through Hell?”

There was a pause at this, as Kavanaugh recognized, belatedly, what Graham had been after, and the relief it would supply. “I would say I’ve been through Hell and then some,” Kavanaugh said. “This was not a job interview. This was Hell.”

Kavanaugh is a practicing Catholic. Those words must have had some specific meaning for him, but his monologue had lingered on the damage to his reputation rather than the experience of his soul. The multiple allegations of sexual assault against him, each of which he has denied, will probably stick with him until the end of his life. He has received death threats. Of course, Ford, who credibly accused Kavanaugh of trying to rape her when they were teen-agers, has received death threats, too, and had to relive her sexual assault in front of the nation, only to have the President of the United States enliven a political rally by questioning why she could not remember some of the details. And her own version of Hell did not end, as Kavanaugh’s almost certainly will today, with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. What Kavanaugh called Hell seemed, from another angle, like the consequence of his own quest for power.

As the invocations of perdition piled up from the partisans, a pattern of fretting set in among the few remaining Senate moderates. The spirit of their concern was easy enough to identify: Supreme Court nominations have long been billed as a solemn process of discernment, but Kavanaugh’s revealed a nakedly partisan endeavor, no different than the rest of power politics. Even so, there was an unusual intensity to the worries. In the final Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Chris Coons, of Delaware, told Kavanaugh, “We are here to determine whether your confirmation would compromise the legitimacy of the Court itself.” Last weekend, Coons joined with Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote for a week so that the F.B.I. could conduct a brief investigation of Ford’s allegations. “This country is being ripped apart,” Flake said. “We have got to make sure that we do due diligence.”

We are in an unusual political situation right now. Republicans have managed to secure control of all three branches of government with only the barest and most contingent of majorities. In theory, this makes a partisan consensus possible, but there is also the danger of public mistrust. Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, the lone Republican to oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation, alluded to this on Friday afternoon. “We need to have institutions that are viewed as fair,” Murkowski said. “If people who are victims feel there is no fairness in our system of government, and particularly within our courts, we’ve gone down a path that is not good and right for this country.”

Susan Collins’s long speech on the Senate floor on Friday was significant not just because she announced that she would cast the decisive vote to confirm Kavanaugh but because, unlike most of her colleagues, she took forty minutes to explain why. On the crucial matter of Ford’s allegations, Collins said that the spirit of due process and the presumption of innocence should apply, so she fashioned her own evidentiary standard—for her to vote no, she would have to conclude that Kavanaugh’s guilt was “more likely than not.” Collins said that she could not find enough support for Ford’s claims to satisfy that standard: there were important gaps in what Ford could recall, and no witnesses could corroborate her account.

But there were gaps in Collins’s explanation, too. Had she wanted to, Collins could have used her leverage, as one of the few undecided senators, to insist on a more thorough F.B.I. investigation. As it was, the investigation was so brief and limited that it had the effect of sealing off the debate within the Senate chamber. Some public momentum had built behind Ford—a poll released by NPR/Marist on Wednesday found that forty-five per cent of Americans believed her, and just thirty-three per cent believed Kavanaugh. (More than twice as many Americans believed Clarence Thomas than believed Anita Hill, by contrast.) But Kavanaugh’s opponents could only protest at the Capitol, argue in the media, and confront senators in elevators and airports. What mattered was what was happening within the Republican caucus, and Ford’s supporters had no way in.

It is easy enough to anticipate what many liberals will do now. The midterm elections are only a month away, and the Democrats have a strong chance of winning control of the House of Representatives. Some liberals will canvass for candidates; many more will donate money. During the coming year, some will plan their own campaigns for public office. Moments after Collins’s speech ended, a Web site raising funds to challenge her in 2020 received so much traffic that it crashed, while collecting more than two million dollars in donations. Sara Gideon, the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, suggested on Twitter that she might run; so, too, did Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national-security adviser.

The consequences won’t touch only Maine. This past Saturday, I attended a town hall with Elizabeth Warren in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where a schoolteacher asked Warren if she would be running for President. The surprise was not in Warren’s reply, in which she edged toward announcing her candidacy, saying that she would take a “long, hard look” at the race immediately after the midterms, but in her description of why she might run, which was all about Kavanaugh. “I watched eleven men too chicken to question a woman themselves,” she said. “I watched powerful men helping another powerful man. . . . I thought, Time’s up.’ ” Warren continued, “It’s time for women to go to Washington and fix a broken government, and that includes a woman at the top.” Liberals are anticipating the midterm and 2020 elections in part because they believe they can transform the politics of the country, and in part because waiting for the next election is all they believe they can do.