What did we learn from the Kavanaugh and Ford Supreme Court hearings?

“His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting”, Trump tweeted. Both told their stories to the Senate Judiciary Committee during a almost nine-hour-long hearing.

“Imagine a woman openly weeping like this on a national stage and still getting elected to the Supreme Court”.

But Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate hearing appears to be one of them.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. But Kavanaugh, she said, was not that somebody. “One hundred percent”, she said.

As she spoke, supporters, staffers and at least one senator, Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, could be seen wiping away tears.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, reacted to a report late Wednesday that GOP committee members had spoken to a pair of men who each, separately, came forward to claim that they – not Kavanaugh – had assaulted Ford.

“This is a circus, the consequences will extend long past my nomination”, he said.

The Supreme Court nominee angrily denied the allegations, calling it a partisan “frenzy”.

“I have never sexually assaulted anyone, not in high school, not in college, not ever”, Kavanaugh told the senators. In the front row, family and friends quietly cried including his wife, Ashley, whose lips were trembling. He presented the senators with what he said were handwritten calendars from 1982 showing his activities and whereabouts.

Kavanaugh was “certainly forceful until it comes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation asking questions or Mark Judge testifying”, Cramer said.

Sound waves from NYSE trading post TVs resound in unison at higher than usual decibel levels as traders watched Christine Blasey Ford testify.

“I definitely saw the rape culture in action when I was an undergrad at Yale”, said Paterson, whose time at the university did not overlap with when Kavanaugh was there.

Heidi Heitkamp. Facing a re-election campaign in North Dakota, a heavily pro-Trump state, she had called for further investigation of Ford’s allegations.

“They weren’t as serious as the allegations against Kavanaugh, but the point is that there are teenage girls who don’t tell stories to a lot of people, and then it comes up”.

Ford began her testimony by describing the anxiety accompanying her appearance before the committee. Grassley was directing most of his ire at Democrats, but with most cable news split screens showing Grassley questioning Ford’s account and a terrified-looking Ford, it felt very adversarial toward Ford.

In a sworn statement, Swetnick said she witnessed Kavanaugh “consistently engage in excessive drinking and inappropriate contact of a sexual nature with women in the early 1980s”.

US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) talks with US Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Cornyn (R-TX) during a break in a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing with US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on September 27, 2018.

It seemed that witnessing visible anger on his behalf from Republican senators was the only thing that could bring Kavanaugh any measure of equanimity.

Republicans hold a 51-49 advantage in the Senate and can’t afford more than one defection to move the confirmation through without Democratic support. But on Thursday, she became a very human being, telling a bad story about Kavanaugh in compelling terms that brought many women to tears and transformed the battle for the Supreme Court.

As noted by CNN, the letter came after the ABA gave Kavanaugh a “well-qualified” rating for the Supreme Court. Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh’s high school, is a Jesuit institution.

Democrats hope that outrage among women will drive them to the polls to help them take control of Congress. Republicans recognize that the confirmation of a nominee accused of sexual assault would be a political liability, but hope to energize the conservative base by focusing on what they characterize as a left-wing character assassination campaign.