“What I’ve been dealing with since July 10th, the downhill slope that Schumer’s put us on, we’re really dealing with a demolition derby,” Sen. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said this past Thursday.
“This has been my ninth Supreme Court hearing and I must say I’ve never seen anything like this,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee who was elected into office a year after HIll’s testimony said on the Senate floor Friday.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was confirmed 96-3 25 years ago, was even lamenting the tensions before Ford came forward. “The Republicans move in lockstep, and so do the Democrats,” she said at an event at George Washington University last month. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and bring it back to the way it was.”
When Thomas was confirmed by that narrow margin in 1991, it was considered an anomaly. Supreme Court confirmation processes were’t considered sources of partisan infighting; they were mundane Senate procedures. Anthony Kennedy, the outgoing justice Kavanaugh will be replacing, was confirmed 97-0 three years before Thomas. But as Washington became increasingly divisive, Supreme Court nominations gradually followed suit. Samuel Alito was confirmed 58-42 in 2005; Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed 68-31 in 2009; Elena Kagan was confirmed 63-37 in 2010. One reason for the bipartisan support for Supreme Court nominees was that confirmation in the Senate still required 60 votes. But in 2017, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell changed the rules to require 51 votes for confirmation in order to ensure the passage of Justice Neil Gorsuch – whose nomination came from Trump despite the Supreme Court seat coming open near the end of President Barack Obama’s term when Justice Antonin Scalia.
But even Gorsuch was confirmed with the support of three Democratic Senators. Kavanaugh had just one Democrat.
Part of these divisions were due to circumstances beyond Kavanaugh’s control. Even before Ford came forward alleging that he had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, he was already facing an intensely partisan Senate. Kennedy was often a swing vote on a Supreme Court divided between four liberal justices and four conservative justices, with Kennedy often a swing vote on key issues like abortion and gay marriage. Kennedy’s retirement meant that Republicans had a chance to tilt the court rightward for a generation. Democrats buoyed by anger from McConnell’s refusal to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland after Scalia’s death, were determined to stop them. Confident that the balance of power in the Senate could shift after the November midterms, Democrats did not want these confirmation hearings to be imminent. “I will oppose him with everything I’ve got,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the morning after Trump nominated Kavanaugh in July. Schumer held true to his word, but Kavanaugh’s nomination didn’t truly seem in doubt until the sexual misconduct allegations surfaced.
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With Kavanaugh’s confirmation now a done deal, Republicans clearly want the FBI investigation to be in the rearview mirror. “What I’d like to do, because this is almost rock bottom, I would like to have the future mending things so we can do things in a collegial way that the United States Senate ought to do, particularly when it comes to Supreme Court nominations,” Grassley said Thursday when asked if he would take any potential action against Ford’s legal team.
To be sure, the Senate was still legislating on a bipartisan basis even as lawmakers attacked each other. This week alone, the chamber almost unanimously passed sweeping legislation addressing the opioid crisis and a bill reauthorizing funding for the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) for the next five years. For some lawmakers, these bills were proof that the chamber could ultimately recover from the divisiveness of the past month. “The Senate’s not very big,” Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt said Friday. “It’s a matter of figuring out of how to find what you can agree with somebody on and move forward on that. There are clearly some hurt feelings here … I think we’ll move on but it will take a while.”
Notably, however, these achievements were completely overshadowed by the partisan infighting. Members on the Senate Judiciary Committee went back and forth over the details of the FBI investigation, with Democrats calling the process a “sham,” and Republicans arguing that Democrats would never be satisfied. McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, repeatedly said on the Senate floor that Democrats were using the allegations as fodder for delay, leading Schumer to all but accuse him of lying.
“It is a blatant falsehood,” Schumer said of McConnell’s remarks this past Wednesday. “I’m so tempted to use the L-word, but he’s my friend.”
That friendship was rarely, if ever, on display this past week.
While Republicans may be pleased with the outcome of the process, the actual steps to get there seemed to leave the entire chamber exhausted, frustrated and unsure how to recover. “If this is not rock bottom, I wouldn’t want to be in my business,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who voted for both of Obama’s Supreme Court nominees and was an outspoken supporter of Kavanaugh, said on Thursday after the FBI report came out.
Notably, the two key Republican swing votes on Kavanagh – Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski – devoted large sections of their floor speeches Friday to lamenting partisan division.
“We have come to the conclusion of a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional it looks more like a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign than a solemn occasion,” Collin said at the top of her 44-minute speech that concluded with her announcing her support of Kavanaugh.
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“Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than 30 years,” she continued. “One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom.”
About four hours later, Murkowski delivered her speech. She had reached a different conclusion than Collins – earlier in the day she had voted against the procedural motion to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination. (She voted present on Saturday to allow her colleague, Montana Sen. Steve Daines, to attend his daughter’s wedding). But when she spoke about her disappointment with the Senate, she was firmly in the same camp as Collins.
“We must do better as a legislative branch,” she said at the beginning of her speech. “We have a moral obligation to do better than this.”
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This article originally appeared on Time. For more stories like this, visit time.com.