So the Kavanaugh hearings are over. How did the Democrats do?

Back in mid-July I wrote on this page that while the Democrats were probably destined to lose the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, there was a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way would be to submit to numerical fate from the start. The right way would be to go down fighting, to signal to the millions of Americans who are counting on them to protect their hard-won rights that they took that job seriously.

They accomplished the latter about as well as could be expected. They raised salient objections from the moment of the opening gavel. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s repeated requests for a vote to delay the proceedings were a bold intervention. The Democrats let America know that thousands of documents pertaining to Mr. Kavanaugh’s White House years had been withheld from them or dumped on them at the last minute. Tough questioning from a range of Democratic senators showed the country a nominee whose responses on topics from abortion rights to executive power were relentlessly evasive.

And yet, unless lightning strikes, Mr. Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the court sometime in the next few weeks and will take his seat before the court’s next session starts in October.

Attention will turn now to that upcoming confirmation vote. The strongest focus of Mr. Kavanaugh’s opponents will be on Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, in the probably vain hope that these two supporters of Roe v. Wade can be pressured to vote against the nominee. Both have signaled that that is unlikely.