It’s hard to see how The New York Times could have handled a new allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh any worse. Two of the Times’ reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, wrote a book on last year’s corrosive confirmation battle. The paper published an essay adapted from it in its Sunday Review section. It included a previously unreported allegation that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a “drunken dorm party” at Yale and thrust himself at an unnamed woman classmate—which Kavanaugh subsequently denied.

That account, provided by classmate Max Stier, seems to bolster the story told by Debbie Ramirez, who said last year that she experienced similar behavior from Kavanaugh during her time at Yale. But the Times buried the account within the article and distributed it on social media with a bizarre, off-putting caption. Multiple Democratic candidates responded by calling for the justice’s impeachment. Then the Times updated the excerpt with additional context: “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”

This is not an article about the Times’ bewildering editorial decisions. The raw emotions that they unearthed only underscore the wound that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle left in the American body politic. Republicans won, at least in the sense that Kavanaugh now sits on the nation’s highest court. But their victory came with immense costs. Conservatives’ zeal to confirm him deprived Americans of their best opportunity to get the fullest possible account of what actually happened. Without a baseline for consensus, that wound will only continue to fester.

This may have been inevitable. One of the great imbalances in American politics is how much more the right cares about the make-up of the federal judiciary than the left. Anthony Kennedy’s retirement gave the conservative legal movement the opportunity it had sought for more than 40 years: five reliably conservative justices on the Supreme Court, untroubled by swing justices or ideologically transient David Souters. The prospect that Hillary Clinton would name Antonin Scalia’s successor helped keep a fractured Republican Party largely united behind Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Their bet paid off in the form of Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

After Trump nominated Kavanaugh, Republicans built a confirmation process where placing him on the court took priority over scrutinizing his record. Kavanaugh had spent most of his career after law school working to advance conservative interests: as a staff attorney in the independent counsel’s office who investigated Vince Foster’s suicide and co-wrote the Starr Report; as a member of George W. Bush’s legal team during the Florida recount battle; as a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office who vetted prospective federal judges. In 2006, Bush nominated him for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most influential courts in the nation.