On the second day of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two weeks ago, Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, pursued a line of questioning that now seems like an act of clairvoyance. “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” she asked. “Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement related to this kind of conduct?”

Kavanaugh answered no to both questions. Then, on September 16th, Christine Blasey Ford came forward with the allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when she was fifteen and he was seventeen (and not yet a legal adult). Hirono responded with a blunt message to America’s men. “Guess who’s perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country,” she said. “And I just want to say to the men in this country, just shut up, and step up! Do the right thing for a change.”

On Sunday, The New Yorker reported that Senate Democrats are investigating a second allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, from Deborah Ramirez, who was a classmate of his at Yale College. According to Ramirez, a male student thrust his penis in her face when she was drunk at a party; she recalls Kavanaugh pulling up his pants while laughing. Kavanaugh would have been eighteen at the time, an adult; when he answered Hirono’s questions, he was under oath. “This is another serious, credible, and disturbing allegation against Brett Kavanaugh,” Hirono said. “It should be fully investigated.”

When I met Hirono at her office in Washington earlier this month, she told me that she did not know about Ford’s coming allegation when she questioned Kavanaugh. (In July, Ford wrote a confidential letter to Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, recounting the alleged assault. Feinstein shared the letter with Senate Democrats in September; she also referred the matter to the F.B.I. “I think Dianne Feinstein did her very best to honor the request for confidentiality,” Hirono told me.)

Hirono asked Kavanaugh about sexual misconduct because, as she said during the hearing, “I did not want the #MeToo movement to be swept under the rug.” Since January, she has asked federal judicial nominees about abuse and harassment. Hirono was particularly interested in Kavanaugh’s responses because of his clerkship under the former judge Alex Kozinski, of the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Kozinski resigned last December, after fifteen women, many of them former clerks, accused him of sexual harassment and assault. In the hearing, Hirono appeared to scoff at Kavanaugh’s claim that he did not know about Kozinski’s behavior before the allegations were reported.

“It’s not as though people didn’t know,” she told me. “But Judge Kavanaugh said he knew nothing, saw nothing, said nothing. We have to draw our own conclusions.”

Hirono isn’t part of the Senate’s pantheon of closely watched resistance heroes. That group includes Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris, each of whom is expected to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. But Hirono, too, has hit back against the Trump Administration, in hearings, at demonstrations, and in media appearances. Born in Japan, she is the only immigrant in the Senate and the only immigrant woman ever to serve there. And she has said, of Trump, “I’m one of the few members who calls him a liar. I don’t sugarcoat it and say he stretches the truth.”

Hirono was born in Fukushima in 1947. She was one of the four children of Laura Chie Hirono, a bookkeeper, and Matabe Hirono, a veterinarian. Laura, who was born to Japanese parents in Hawaii, was an American citizen. As Hirono recalled in a speech on the Senate floor during the final vote on the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, last year, her sister died of pneumonia at the age of two. “She died at home,” Hirono said. “Not in a hospital, where maybe her life could have been saved. It’s hard for me to talk about this. I think you can tell.”

Hirono’s parents separated when she was four—her father was abusive, and a gambler—and, four years later, her mother brought Mazie and her brother Roy to Honolulu. Laura picked up work at a Japanese-language newspaper, but the family had perilously little money. On the night of the Obamacare vote, Hirono said, “Growing up as a young girl in Hawaii, my greatest fear was that my mother would get sick. And, if she got sick, how were we going to pay for her care? How would she go to work? And, if she didn’t go to work, there would be no pay. There would be no money. I know what it’s like to run out of money at the end of the month. That was my life as an immigrant here.”

Hirono knew no English when she came to the U.S., but she did well enough in school to earn admission to the University of Hawaii, where she became interested in politics and protested the Vietnam War. She went on to study at Georgetown Law School and then returned to Hawaii. In 1980, after nearly a decade managing political campaigns, Hirono was elected to Hawaii’s House of Representatives, where she served for nearly fourteen years before becoming the state’s lieutenant governor. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, representing Hawaii’s Second District, and has served in the Senate since 2013.

In addition to the Judiciary Committee, Hirono serves on the Armed Services Committee, where she believes the presence of women has been especially significant. Of twenty-seven members, “there are seven women on their committee, a pretty macho committee,” she told me. “And it’s the women who have focussed on the scourge of sexual harassment and assault going on in the military—which we still haven’t resolved, but at least there is some more attention being paid to what’s going on. If the women weren’t on the committee, that wouldn’t be happening.”

“There are any number of ways we can create change,” Hirono said. “But, in the political arena, one of the ways is having diverse people and women running for office.” She mentioned a line of questioning that she took on during Kavanaugh’s hearings. In 1999, Kavanaugh wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about a case that was before the Supreme Court concerning whether native Hawaiians alone should be able to elect the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a semi-autonomous state agency handling native Hawaiian issues. Kavanaugh argued that native Hawaiians couldn’t be the beneficiaries of such restrictions. “They don’t have their own government,” he wrote. “They don’t have their own system of laws. They don’t have their own elected leaders. They don’t live on reservations or in territorial enclaves. They don’t even live together in Hawaii.”

“It’s hard to know what to say to this assertion,” Hirono said, during the hearing. “It sounds like you’re saying that native groups in the United States derive their rights from having been herded into reservations and cheated out of their land. Or that they surrender their rights when they move outside of these artificial boundaries.” Kavanaugh replied that the Court had ruled against the state’s voting scheme, although Hirono noted that it had done so on different grounds.