WASHINGTON — The voices carried everywhere, quavering but firm.

They cut through the spitting mist, the words broadcast on laptops and cellphones, as protesters in black outside the Capitol shouted “Kava-NO” at counterprotesters insisting that women can lie just as well as men.

They ricocheted through the bars — their screens fixed, unusually, on a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — and from the executive television set of the First Viewer, who knew enough to keep his twittering fingers to himself at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, until dusk anyway.