Since the sexual assault allegations against him were made public earlier this month, can you think of a single thing Brett Kavanaugh has done or said that makes you more confident that he’ll be a judge of high integrity on the Supreme Court? I cannot. At every step of the way he has acted less like a potential justice and more like a partisan functionary, desperately clinging to the chance at the job of his lifetime. He has, in this way if not others, already disqualified himself for the job regardless of how the (now two) sexual assault allegations against him pan out.

There are Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations of “attempted rape” that Kavanaugh must answer for during a hearing scheduled for Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And now there are new allegations that Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct not just in high school, when Ford says the episode took place, but also at Yale University, where Kavanaugh attended. A woman named Deborah Ramirez has stepped forward to tell Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer at The New Yorker that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a drunken party in the 1983-84 school year and made her touch it.

Kavanaugh denies the new allegation with the same vigor with which he has denied Ford’s allegations. But the emergence of Ramirez makes it even more imperative that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee stop the voting track and investigate all of this in a serious way. That means they must abandon the he-said/she-said plan for Thursday’s hearing and open it up to other witnesses who will either incriminate or exculpate Kavanaugh and the women who say he’s a sex offender. And it means Kavanaugh and the White House must abandon the approach they’ve taken to his defense so far.

Kavanaugh is not on trial for his life. He’s not a defendant in a court of law. His accusers and their supporters need not make a case of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They don’t even need to make a case using the civil standard of a “preponderance of the evidence.” This notion that Kavanaugh can convince America that he is innocent by producing his calendar from 1982 is patently absurd in a process in which live witnesses are barred from providing their insight about what Kavanaugh’s life was like in those days. It wasn’t going to fly when Ford was the only accuser. It’s certainly not going to fly now that Ramirez has stepped forward.

But put aside these other people and focus only on the man who wants to help shape the course of American law for the next two generations. The man who preached “judicial independence” during his listless testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, the man who is a life-tenured judge on a federal appeals court, spent parts of at least four days last week at the White House being “prepped” for his looming confrontation with Ford. Prepped, that is, by the very executive branch officials whose presidential privilege claims he may be asked to adjudicate, in a matter of months perhaps, if he ascends to the High Court. That’s not judicial independence. That’s a conflict of interest.