When the doors to the Hart Senate Office Building opened at 7:30 A.M. last Friday, a few protesters making a final show of opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh were waiting to be let in. As they waited, a woman named Maria Gallagher, with dark hair and glasses, introduced herself to me. She told me she lived in the area and had taken the morning off from work in response to a call to action from the progressive organizations MoveOn and UltraViolet. I asked if she was planning to get arrested—many of those visiting the building that day were prepared for civil disobedience. She said “no.” She had told her employer that she would be in by noon.
By that time, video of her challenging the Arizona senator Jeff Flake over his support of Kavanaugh was being broadcast across the country. Like many of the other protesters, Gallagher had heard Christine Blasey Ford testify that Kavanaugh attacked her in high school (Kavanaugh has denied the allegations), and was there to tell her own story of sexual assault.
“I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me,” she told Flake. “I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because, if they tell you what happened to them, you are going to ignore them.”
Alongside her was Ana María Archila, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive organization that has been helping arrange protests at the Capitol in recent weeks.
“We demand to know what you’re thinking,” Archila said. “Do you stand with these women? Do you stand with this nation, who deserves due process?” Flake did not answer. Later in the day, though, after the video went viral, he called for a time-limited F.B.I. investigation into Ford’s allegations.
The moments in which a protest explodes into national awareness tend to involve the unpredictable confluences of a particularly eloquent and impassioned activist and a cable-news network. Earlier this year, Emma González was one of many people who gave speeches at a gun-control rally in downtown Fort Lauderdale, but the moment of clarity was apparent during her speech, and six months later activists still wear “We Call B.S.” buttons. Last December, Ady Barkan, a health-care activist who has A.L.S., stopped Flake on an airplane and begged him to “be an American hero” by supporting the Affordable Care Act. (He didn’t.) Barkan’s influence was reflected in the “Be a Hero” T-shirt that Maria Gallagher was photographed wearing on Friday. Activists have been roaming the halls of the Senate office buildings since August 1st, protesting against Kavanaugh and seeking to confront senators with personal stories and questions about the nominee, in a strategy known as “bird-dogging.” Hundreds of people have been arrested for civil disobedience. But Friday was the moment that the rest of the country started paying attention.
By 8 A.M., several dozen protesters had convened in the Hart Building’s atrium.
“We’re basically occupying the Senate—the Hart atrium is our Zuccotti Park,” Melissa Byrne, an organizer with UltraViolet, told me. She leaned against a planter containing a ficus tree and kicked off her sandals. “I just wear my socks in here now.” They were mismatched; one was diamond-patterned, and the other read “This is what a feminist looks like.”
A protester named Mary Jane Maestras, who wore an “End Sexual Violence” T-shirt, arrived with an entourage carrying cardboard boxes of coffee and pastries. “What do you guys think? Are we ready to end this today?” she asked. Another woman arrived pushing a dolly holding cardboard box filled with “Be a Hero” T-shirts and a twenty-four pack of bottled water.
Because there had been some hope that the Judiciary Committee might delay its scheduled vote, the protest had been announced at short notice, and most of the demonstrators came from nearby. New signs responded to Kavanaugh’s testimony on Thursday: “Crybaby fratboy, put a pacifier in it.” “Speak up, Sir! Do you want a beer???”
Along a back wall stood a group of spiritual leaders wearing clerical collars and stoles, beards, and kippahs. I spoke with Sister Quincy Howard, a Washington-based member of the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters, an order of nuns in Wisconsin. She told me that she decided to come after watching Ford’s testimony. She was impressed, she said, by “how God was able to break through the noise.” As for Kavanaugh, a professed man of faith: “The faithful response is not to dig your heels in.”
“He is trying to maintain this veneer of perfection and accomplishment, and that is not the way that you find Jesus,” she added. “The way you find Jesus is by repenting and admitting the things that you did that you’re ashamed of.” The clergy led the rest of the group in prayer. “Help us that we stay in righteous, loving anger today,” said the Reverend Dr. Cari Jackson, of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. “One who works miracles, we call on you to work miracles today in the halls of justice.”
Bob Bland, a co-founder of Women’s March and a fashion designer, looked groovy in orange aviator sunglasses, blue bell-bottoms, and a jean jacket with her name embroidered in red on the pocket. Bland had got arrested in the rain the day before, at the Supreme Court, and was losing both her voice and her patience. “If you vote ‘yes’ on Kavanaugh, you are a rape apologist and women will never forgive you,” she said. “We will remember, and, as much as you would like it to be different, we have the vote. And we will vote. And so that’s how I feel about that.”
Compared with earlier in the week, the Hart Building looked somewhat deserted. Paul Davis, a bearded and ponytailed activist with Housing Works, stood in a cluster with Jennifer Flynn Walker, an organizer with the Center for Popular Democracy, and Bland, conferring on a plan. A woman was distributing safety whistles from an R.E.I. bag. Another person had lanyards that said “Power to the polls” on them.
“Oh, my God, we have rape whistles—we can put them on the fucking lanyards,” said Bland. “We need to get more people lanyards!”
The Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote at 9:30 A.M., and the protesters now gathered to get as close to the hearing room as they could. With Bland in the lead, they walked toward the Dirksen Senate Office Building, trailed by members of the National Lawyers Guild, in bright green hats, and the boom microphones of a few news networks. Capitol police met them at the end of a hallway on the second floor, where the hearing was being held, and stopped them from going further. They started shouting, “We believe Christine Ford” and “We will not forget!”
It was around nine-thirty, in the Russell Senate Office Building, that Maria Gallagher, accompanied by Ana María Archila, came across Jeff Flake. When I spoke to Archila later, she told me, “This young woman was here for the first time—she had never bird-dogged, she had never talked to a member of Congress—so she was just asking, ‘How do you do this?’ ‘What do you say?’ ” As Archila, who has trained many people in the art of pointed questioning, began to explain, Flake came out from another door. “We ran behind him and inserted ourselves in the elevator, and were able to force him to look at our faces, as we told him our stories and demanded that he tell us if he was O.K. with putting someone who is accused of harming young women, like we were harmed, in the Supreme Court.”
I asked her how he had reacted. “He seemed incredibly uncomfortable,” she said. “I think frankly that he was ashamed of his vote. Like, I think he understood that what he was doing was incoherent with who he says he is. I think he wanted to be anywhere but in that elevator.”
On the second floor of Dirksen, the protesters deployed their safety whistles, an unrelenting shriek that pierced the air, as the police moved in. I moved down the hallway with other people avoiding arrest. For the next twenty minutes, we watched as, one by one, they removed zip-tied protesters, who were still shouting, “We won’t be silent!” and “Hell no, Kavanaugh!” Their supporters made jazz hands in solidarity. Eighty-one arrests were made.
It had seemed, at the start of the morning, that the protesters were there to express their endurance. They had been at it for weeks now, well before Ford’s allegations became public; the Republican senators had carried on as if nothing had changed. But by midmorning the day had veered in another direction. Back in the atrium, people were playing the video of Archila and Gallagher confronting Flake on their phones. During the week, dozens of women had given public testimonies that were just as powerful as Archila and Gallagher’s, but it was in this instance that the Times published a transcript of the women’s words in full, and CNN played the video all afternoon.
There were a few loud whoops as Senators Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, and Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, materialized beneath the Alexander Calder sculpture “Mountains and Clouds.” The demonstrators clustered around them, shushing one another. Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, his hearings have been good for the political fortunes of Hirono and Harris, who, in a room with Orrin Hatch and Lindsey Graham, come off looking like Amazons of Themyscira, from “Wonder Woman.” A microphone appeared. After Grassley had insisted that the committee vote on Friday, regardless of lingering questions about Kavanaugh, the two women had met eyes and walked out, they now said. “What we did was totally unplanned. We were just so fed up,” Hirono said. Everyone seemed a little surprised, including Hirono and Harris. “I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t sit here any longer,’ ” Harris said. “It was disgusting that they were pushing this through.”
A few minutes later, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, joined them. I watched a woman, standing by herself in the back, hold her palms up in front of her. On the right palm was written “I was 15.” On the left, “I didn’t tell.”
The mood was still dire, the situation unchanged. The Judiciary Committee had not yet voted. There was a moment of celebration when Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, who was considered a swing vote, announced he would oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation. A group of demonstrators left to deliver flowers to the office of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and a possible swing vote in Kavanaugh’s confirmation. A group from Maine went to pay yet another visit to their senator, Susan Collins, another potential swing voter. The Senate Judiciary Committee vote had been rescheduled for one-thirty in the afternoon. The appointed hour came and went. I stood outside of Senator Orrin Hatch’s office, and looked through the glass doors at a television that hung on the wall.
Suddenly word came that voting had begun. Several of the activists began streaming the coverage on their phones, which produced a warped, echoing effect, because different phones streamed at slightly different paces. They stood silent as this haphazard speaker system delivered the news that Flake had voted with the Republican majority to recommend Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Senate, but that he thought it would be “proper” to reopen Kavanaugh’s F.B.I. background check before the full Senate vote. A couple of women began to cry. The phones played the “ayes” of the judiciary committee.
Jennifer Flynn Walker, from the Center for Popular Democracy, gave an announcement: “O.K., everybody, it’s been voted out of committee, eleven to ten,” she said. “They might have delayed it for a week, but we’re not sure.”
Flynn Walker listed the names of senators who had not announced how they would vote: on the Republican side, Flake, Murkowski, and Collins; on the Democratic side, Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin, of West Virginia. “This afternoon, let’s just go make ourselves comfortable in their offices,” she said. “Look them in the eye, and make yourself heard.”
