In the past few weeks, hundreds of people, most of them women, have travelled to Washington, D.C., from around the country to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Some had scheduled meetings with their elected officials. Others made impromptu visits to senators’ offices, hoping for a stray encounter. When they did make contact, they deployed a strategy known as bird-dogging, asking pointed questions about how a senator would be voting. They spoke about their fears of losing health insurance, access to safe and legal abortion, and safeguards that protect voters’ rights. More than anything else, though, they spoke about having survived sexual assault, and expressed their anger that a credible allegation against the nominee had been disbelieved, as so many of their own stories had been.
Their efforts came to a head at the end of this week. On Thursday, the F.B.I. submitted a report about the allegations against Kavanaugh to the Senate. A single physical copy was placed in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a guarded room in the basement of the Capitol, where the senators could visit the document. The public was given no knowledge of what the report contained. As this official drama played out in the Capitol, the activists mounted a dogged campaign to influence the last remaining holdouts, and to remind those who had already made up their minds that they were still paying attention.
At 7 A.M. on Thursday, a group of about ten people met up at Union Station, then walked together to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s house on a nearby street. “Nothing fancy was done to find his house,” Melissa Byrne, an organizer with Ultra Violet, reassured the group. “Just public records.”
The sun had just risen. The group walked from the train station through streets that were golden and hazy, warm for October, and still quiet. At one corner, a lone woman waiting to cross the street gave the group a quiet thumbs-up. At a deli called the Capitol Hill Supermarket, the group stopped. “Never show up at someone’s house empty-handed,” Jennifer Flynn Walker, the director of mobilization and advocacy at the Center for Popular Democracy Action, said. Inside, she and an activist named Chris Bubser, who had travelled from Los Angeles, filled up some paper cups with coffee. “He’s not going to take this, but we’ll give it to the cops,” Walker said. They bought two Sharpies as well, and inscribed messages on the cup sleeves.
When they arrived on McConnell’s block, they began chanting “Vote no on Kavanaugh.” Then they stopped in front of a townhouse with drawn curtains. A man in a suit with a radio transmitter in his ear stood outside the front door. A parked S.U.V. with tinted windows idled nearby.
“Knock, knock,” Byrne said, in a voice that was raised but friendly in tone. “Senator McConnell, please come outside and have a conversation. Let’s talk about justice. Let’s talk about fairness.”
Others stepped forward to speak. A man wearing a liturgical stole informed McConnell that “God is never on the side of the rich and mighty. God is on the side of those who need it.” Another man said he was there for “his future grandchildren.” An upper-floor window opened in the building next door, and one of McConnell’s neighbors began shooting video on his phone.
“Senator McConnell, we’re concerned citizens,” Bubser, a blond woman who appeared to be in her fifties, said. “We’re not fringe lefties,” she said. “We’re mothers and fathers, and ministers, and rabbis, and parents, and conservatives who just want to be heard.” Walker stood without speaking, furiously chewing gum and holding up a coffee cup that had “Listen to Women” written on it in Sharpie.
The day before, McConnell had made a statement on the Senate floor. “We will not be intimidated by these people,” he said. “There is no chance in the world that they’re going to scare us out of doing our duty.” Now the protesters answered. “When you don’t have meetings, if you don’t practice the beautiful practice of democracy, we’re left having to do it the old-fashioned way, coming over and knocking on your door,” Byrne, who was being trailed that day by a television crew from Vice, said. “You’re making us do this. You are setting the terms of engagement, and we have to adapt to your rules.”
If he was inside, the Senate Majority Leader did not make himself known. It was a brief visit, lasting not even ten minutes. The group departed for the Hart Senate Office Building, where its members would join hundreds of other protesters. They had a long day ahead of them.
The buses from Maine had left Portland at 9 P.M. on Wednesday, and arrived in the Capitol just after 7 A.M. on Thursday. The buses from New York City had left just after 6 A.M. Nearly a hundred people flew in from Alaska.
I met a couple of protesters from North Dakota, who had been stuck in Minneapolis for the night but arrived by lunchtime, still carrying their rolling suitcases. They were about to visit the office of their senator, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat up for reëlection in a state that voted for Donald Trump by a margin of thirty-six points. One was Laura Frisch, from Grand Forks. Frisch works at the Community Violence Intervention Center, a nonprofit that supports victims of domestic and sexual violence. “We want to acknowledge all of the work that Senator Heitkamp has done over the years for victims,” Frisch said, and to tell the senator to “stay down that path.”
I also spoke with a young woman named Kendall Dieno, of Portland, Maine. Dieno works at Trader Joe’s, and Wednesdays and Thursdays are her weekend. After seeing video of Trump mocking Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, she cancelled dinner plans with a friend, asked a neighbor to watch her cat, and got on an all-night bus to Washington to seek a meeting with her senator, Susan Collins.
Dieno told me she had been sexually assaulted in 2010, when she was sixteen, by an honors student whom she had met through a community-service group. Although she wrote a document after the incident and remembers the date, she never reported it.
“I’ve been angry for a long time, but these past few weeks have felt more like a gantlet—like, I’ve missed work. It’s brought up a lot of my past traumas,” she said. “I’ve been so angry and frustrated to see Dr. Ford being critiqued in the same way that I was when I was sixteen, being told that I made it up and being mocked.”
As the senators continued reading the F.B.I.’s report, the protesters dispersed from their informal headquarters, in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. Outside, the temperature climbed into the upper eighties, and several hundred women gathered on Constitution Avenue for a march and a rally. “Kavanaugh lies, we are pissed, we ain’t going to take this shit,” they chanted. The march ended on the steps of the Supreme Court, where news spread that Heitkamp would be voting against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Our actions right now are a poignant signal to young girls and women across our country,” Heitkamp told a radio station in Fargo. She added that “countless” people from North Dakota had shared stories with her in the days since Ford’s testimony.
Following the rally, the protesters returned to the Hart Senate Office Building to stage a sit-in. Nearly three hundred were arrested. The remaining undecided senators still had not announced their votes.
McConnell had scheduled a procedural vote for ten-thirty the next morning, on Friday. At 10:24 A.M., Collins emerged from her office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building into a thicket of microphones and activists. She paused in the glare of the television lights, told the crowd that she would be voting yes on the procedural vote, and said that she would announce her further intentions later that day. “Please do the right thing!” the protesters pleaded. “Vote no! Vote no!” they called as Collins disappeared down a stairwell. “Save us!”
The cloture vote arrived. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Republican from Alaska, voted against Kavanaugh. Senator Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, voted in support of him. Senator Jeff Flake, the Republican from Arizona, also voted yes, and soon announced that he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the floor vote as well. Outside Manchin’s office, three women wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts took a selfie in front of the bronze plaque bearing Manchin’s name. Inside, protesters talked about what it meant that a Democrat was casting a vote that would allow all three branches of the government to be controlled by the same party. Later that afternoon, several of them staged a sit-in and were arrested.
Outside Murkowski’s office, dozens of Alaskan women gathered and shared their stories. “Give a round of applause to Senator Murkowski for her bravery,” someone said. Bouquets of flowers were distributed to give to the senator. I spoke with Christina Love, an Alaska native who had travelled from Juneau and was holding a red carnation. She works at a nonprofit, teaching about the intersection of substance use and trauma. Love described herself as a political independent, and said she had voted for Murkowski. “I really believe that my senator listens to people, and not just people in power,” she said. “Sexual-assault issues are nonpartisan.”
Senator Collins delivered her grand announcement at 3 P.M. from the Senate floor. The waiting room of her office, which is decorated with a lobster trap and buoys, had been occupied most of the day by protesters sharing their stories, and the hallways were filled with media cameras. As she gave her speech, which lasted more than forty minutes, Capitol police cleared not only the area in front of her door but the entire floor. A group of twenty or so pro-Kavanaugh demonstrators took refuge in the office of Senator Lamar Alexander, the Republican from Tennessee, the interior of which is decorated like a log cabin, with furs and a lumberjack’s shirt hanging on the wall.
I watched the speech with other protesters in the Hart Building, in the ground-floor office of Senator Kamala Harris, the Democrat from California. Collins, in delaying her decision, had claimed the attention of the entire nation, and won the opportunity to present herself as a fair and considered centrist who had carefully weighed all sides before reaching a conclusion. But her speech was not the speech of a person who had agonized over a difficult decision. It was a supremely confident endorsement, written by someone who had reserved for herself the last word on the matter, and who, as she went on, showed signs of inhabiting a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility of her own design.
For the protesters watching, it was a discouraging spectacle. “If most of the country doesn’t want something, you’re supposed to listen to it,” Jennifer Flynn Walker had told me, as we stood in the Hart atrium the previous day. “If people fly in, and have this level of activism and energy, we should win. Last night there were ninety-seven vigils that popped up that took, like, two days to organize. . . . We have so many people coming here we don’t know what to do with them half the time.”
It became clear, though, that Collins saw the activists not as people taking drastic measures in drastic times but as fanatics averse to compromise, in a world where she herself occupied a pragmatic center. “It is not merely a case of differing groups having different opinions,” she said from the Senate floor. “It is a case of people bearing extreme ill will toward those who disagree with them. In our intense focus on our differences, we have forgotten the common values that bind us together as Americans.”
The activists had been motivated by a profound sense of injustice. Collins did not speak of them directly, but when she described “sophisticated algorithms designed to link us to Web sites that only reinforce and cater to our views,” and cause “our differences to intensify,” she seemed to be suggesting that the outpourings of concern and frustration witnessed in the Capitol over the past several weeks were not an exceptional display of civic engagement but a symptom of mass hysteria provoked by an entire country living in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities.
This past week, hundreds of people were arrested on an ongoing basis in the Capitol for acts of civil disobedience against a single party’s platform. Jennifer Flynn Walker told me that it had not been hard to get people to come to the Capitol, and she pointed out how many kinds of people were involved. “People just show up, and they really are people,” she said. “Look at the differences in the ways that people dress. They’re not from the same band or clique, it’s not all young people, it’s not all old people, it’s not all women, although it’s mostly women, but it’s not all women. It’s not, you know . . . it’s people who are middle-aged, it’s young people, but it’s not all young people.” Kavanaugh’s success, despite such resistance, she said, had “broken something inside of us. We actually can’t believe that we have to fight this hard.”
But maybe Collins is right. Polls show little support for Kavanaugh, but polls are often wrong. Maybe the center is represented by the much smaller group of pro-Kavanaugh demonstrators, or by Republican legislators from swing states, like Collins herself. After Collins declared her support for Kavanaugh, organizers from Women’s March, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, and NARAL Pro-Choice America gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court for a press conference, where the Women’s March co-presidents, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland, raised the spectre of the fifty-three per cent of white women voters who cast ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016 election; it only reinforced the importance of encouraging women voters in November, they said. Until then, one cannot really know. Does Collins represent the mainstream of public opinion? Or does the center look like something else?
