Most everyone in America appears to have grown more enraged during the past three years, but Jeff Flake—a Republican from Arizona, and a presumed swing vote in the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation—has only appeared more pained. On Friday, he looked more withdrawn than ever, eyes wet, voice a little frayed, chin tucked down in the sombre knot of his tie. This morning, Flake released a statement saying that he would support Kavanaugh, after all. Shortly after, two protestors stopped his elevator for five minutes, told him their stories of sexual assault, and asked how Brett Kavanaugh, accused of attempted rape and howling about the partisan conspiracy against him, could be trusted to deliver justice for all Americans. “Thank you,” Flake said quietly, meeting their eyes after one of the women demanded it.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee room at lunchtime, he looked no less haggard, but his view had changed. Flake voted with the other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to refer Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, but he also said that he wanted an F.B.I. investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh before a confirmation vote. (Kavanaugh denies the allegations.) Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, voiced her support for the idea. Later this afternoon, the Republican leadership announced that the vote would be delayed, and President Trump requested the investigation, saying that it must be completed in less than a week.

Last year, Flake published a book called “The Conscience of a Conservative,” decrying the decline of his party in the Trump era, and announced that he would not seek reëlection. He was an unlikely apostate: Flake is a committed conservative, and part of the libertarian insurgency that controlled the Republican Party for much of this past decade. Early this year, there was a spasm of speculation that he might run for President in 2020, but he never had the right mood for the moment: politics seemed to make him sad. Two days ago, he took to the Senate floor to criticize the President. Trump had just asked why Christine Blasey Ford had not gone to the police when she was fifteen, if she had truly been sexually assaulted. “How uninformed and uncaring do you have to be to say things like that, much less believe them?” Flake said. He went on to say that, whatever came of Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimony, it would not repair the trust lost in the confirmation hearings. “However this vote goes,” Flake said, “I am confident in saying it will be forever steeped in doubt.”

During the hearing Thursday, Democrats kept pleading for a week delay so that the F.B.I. could investigate the allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. At times, it seemed strange that they dwelled so heavily on this—that each Democratic senator emphasized the same points, repeatedly—at the expense of conducting their own interrogation. Now, the point seems a little clearer. Around 1 p.m. on Friday, just before the Judiciary Committee vote, Flake went over to Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Amy Klobuchar and beckoned them outside. Soon the committee had paused—all the senators had headed out to an anteroom, and their aides were staring mutely at their phones. When they returned, Flake spoke briefly. “I think we ought to do what we can to do all due diligence,” he said, and he asked for a delay. He said, “The country is being ripped apart.” Other senators started to talk, and Flake shut his eyes and rested his chin in his hand.

It has gotten harder for Democrats and Republicans to find institutions that both trust—not universities, the police, media, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the church. The F.B.I. is not a natural source of consensus, as anyone who has observed Trump’s bristling reaction to the agency’s role in the Russia investigation knows. Seven days of interviews is unlikely to settle the question of a decades-old sexual assault, let alone repair the deeper ruptures in our politics. But Flake bought a little time, restored a little bit of integrity to the process, and perhaps offered some reassurance that, in 2018, if a woman credibly and publicly accuses a very powerful man of trying to rape her, then it will not just disappear into the vacuum of politics—that something will happen.

Ever since Flake’s book was published, the political class has waited for a grand moment when he would defy his party and its President. A more reasonable expectation might have been a small moment, like Friday’s, when he groped towards a common basis for political comprehension, and bought some time. It doesn’t diminish Flake to say that this gesture suited him. Flake’s resistance found its level.