Peter Baker

Yeah. Let’s just roam around for a little while in the creation of the Federalist Society, who they are and what they do, where they came from, what the idea was. …

For years conservatives have been frustrated with the Supreme Court. They had the Earl Warren court, which had expanded rights, and in the view of conservatives basically made up parts of the Constitution that didn't actually exist. It was activist; it needed to be reined in. The [Warren] Burger court, while appointed by Richard Nixon, proved to be really only a consolidator of these kind of liberal rulings.

And then you had the fights of the 1980s over Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork was a former solicitor general of the United States, a member of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington and a real icon for the conservative legal movement, a believer in a very strict construction of the Constitution, willing to say things and write things that were very controversial, was not politically correct in any fashion.

And when his nomination went down in a fiery, very ideological fight in the Senate, it galvanized these young conservative activists to try to do something about it. And that really took the form of the Federalist Society, which emerged as a force in Republican politics in a way that had not been seen before. The Federalist Society included conservative lawyers, particularly young lawyers who wanted to reshape the judiciary, pull it back from what it thought were the extremes of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

And they began inserting that issue into political campaigns. They began training young lawyers, sort of developing possible candidates who years in the future would be good choices for a president to put on a district court, circuit court and eventually the Supreme Court.

The idea being, of course, originalism or many of the phrases that it’s called, its early advisers were Antonin Scalia and Bork himself. And I gather the idea was that it would be a sort of home for not only ideas, but as you say a kind of training ground almost like the minor leagues, preparing people for a launch into the Supreme Court.

Well, what they realized was it wasn’t just enough to complain about liberal judges and justices; they had to do something about it in a tangible, practical way, and that was to create their own corps of future judges to people who would, in fact, be qualified, capable and strong candidates for future presidents when they were looking around for people to put on the bench. You couldn’t complain. You couldn’t just fight somebody with nobody. You had to create alternative candidates, in effect, and that's what they did. They set out to sort of reshape the judiciary by creating this corps of future judges.

And people like Leonard Leo and Steve Calabresi and others who were there at the origin moment. Who is Leonard Leo?

See, I don’t have his biography. Leonard Leo is the vice president of the Federalist Society, but more importantly than that, became the right hand to successive Republican presidents in their determination of who to put on the Supreme Court and some of the circuit courts. He was one of what we call the “Four Horsemen” during the George W. Bush administration. These "Four Horsemen" were advisers to the president and vice president as they were trying to pick what ultimately would be two Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and Sam Alito. He later became even more of an influential voice with President Trump, kind of a singular figure almost, as a voice in the ear of Don McGahn, the White House counsel, helping develop lists of candidates who would be potential Supreme Court justices, not to mention circuit court judges and district court judges around the country.

So it needed a sort of origin moment. Bork provides that. It needed, at some moment, the driving force of presidents who were willing to listen and for whatever reasons be politically vulnerable, if you're George H. W. Bush and you pick Souter, and suddenly the Federalist Society’s at your door talking to [Chief of Staff John] Sununu and saying, “Wait a minute; what about us?”

Yeah. I mean, look, the David Souter nomination in some ways was just as influential in the conservative movement as the Bork nomination was. Souter obviously gets on the court, unlike Bork, but because he ends up drifting to the left, he becomes the talisman for this whole Federalist Society movement, a metaphor for how we can't let this happen again. We can't have judges who don’t have a track record that we can judge going onto the court, so we know he or she is going to stay true to the conservative ideals that we are seeking.

And the battle cry became “No more Souters. No more Souters.” And when George W. Bush becomes president, he adopts that mantle. He himself basically says that Souter was a mistake by his father. His father doesn’t agree. But in his process that he develops to pick judges and Supreme Court justices, this idea of not repeating the Souter mistake is a driving, animating force.

The other thing that’s necessary, of course, is a powerful leader of the United States Senate, whether he or she is on the committee or not. In fact, somebody who is a minority leader or the majority leader is essential toward the traffic copping and pushing along an agenda by a very powerful group like the Federalist Society, and such a person is Mitch McConnell.

Right, yeah. Nobody’s more important for getting conservative judges on courts in America right now than Mitch McConnell. He has been the field marshal for this effort to confirm judges at all levels who meet the criteria that conservative legal scholars have been looking for. And he is a smart, shrewd tactician. He understands the Senate rules like nobody else. He has more control over what gets to the floor, obviously, than any other senator, and he has an ability and a drive to push these nominations forward, so that when President Trump came in, it wasn't a thing that President Trump had spent his career thinking about. This is a real estate developer who actually hated courts because he kept getting dragged into them. But he wasn’t a legal scholar by any stretch. He wouldn’t be able to tell you the origins of originalism or get into scholarly debates about judicial activism. What he knew was as a candidate, promising conservative Supreme Court justices had been a key to winning the presidency; that when the conservatives who were uncomfortable with him for so many other reasons, because of his position on free trade, his own personal life, because of his scandals, he could reassure them by saying, “If you give me the presidency, I make sure you get people like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and Hillary Clinton is going to give you liberals.”

And so these conservatives who didn't particularly like President Trump for other reasons swallowed those concerns, because for them, the Supreme Court was the main goal. It was the most important thing driving their choice in the election. Mitch McConnell becomes his right hand in making that happen.

… What is McConnell’s response to the death of Scalia?

Well, Mitch McConnell doesn't even wait for the day to end after Antonin Scalia dies to put out a statement saying, in effect, “We're not going to let President Obama replace him; that it’s an election year, [and] we're going to wait for the next president to nominate somebody, and the people, in effect, should have a role in making that decision.” He literally—Antonin Scalia had just died earlier that same day. He didn't even wait for the funeral to even begin the politics.

McConnell felt he had no choice but to move quickly, because he had a series of Republicans out there running for president themselves who were already rushing out to lay down a marker, particularly Ted Cruz from Texas, who was one of Donald Trump’s last challengers for the nomination.

And McConnell understood that he was going to be flanked to the right by people who were going to oppose anybody that Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court. So McConnell decided to get out ahead of that and lay down a marker that would put his entire conference on the line as resisting any nomination from the White House.

A clock is sort of ticking as well, which is that night in South Carolina, there's to be a debate among the Republican candidates. Donald Trump, center stage.

Exactly. And Mitch McConnell knows that debate’s about to happen. He knows he has to get his word out before that debate, so he’s setting the tone for the debate, not the candidates.

And Trump at that moment, as you say absolutely appropriately, not exactly on any conservative’s list as a guy who would be my favorite candidate … seems to be sending—it’s almost like he’s sending a message to McConnell: “I'm with you. Come be with me,” you know?

Trump looks at this as an opportunity to show conservatives he’s one of them, and they have a lot of doubts. But it also suits his sort of combative nature. “Yes, let’s have a fight about this. Let’s fight with Obama.” Combat is his bread and butter; that’s his campaign. And so he easily and happily adopts that, because he’s also a short-term thinker. He’s not looking ahead to what might happen if he does become president and he might have a vacancy on the Supreme Court someday and a Democratic Senate might decide, “Well, hey, we're not going to let you fill that one either until an election.”

So it’s the middle of March. He’s the presumptive, almost—I mean, everybody sort of knows it’s going to be him now, so it’s time for him to come to Washington. He meets with McConnell kind of briefly, meets with some of the Republican senators. But he also goes to Jones Day, a law firm with Don McGahn, where Don McGahn worked, and meets with Leonard Leo and others. And a famous list, at least the idea of a list, begins to emerge. Tell us that story.

Right. Well, I don't know much about that particular meeting, but I’ll tell you this. This list that emerges from his meetings with Don McGahn and Leonard Leo is really unlike anything we’d seen in modern presidential politics. You always have Republicans and Democrats promising their voters that they’ll appoint a Supreme Court justice who reflects our values, right, whatever those values might be. But they usually say, “I'm not going to impose a litmus test of any sort,” and they rarely give any kind of specificity about who they might appoint. When George W. Bush was asked during his campaign, he said, “I will appoint justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia,” but he didn't actually name the ones he might put on there. Donald Trump agreed to go further. He would actually put out a list of names that he would consider as candidates for the Supreme Court. That's an extraordinary thing, and it reassured these conservative activists that he was going to be serious about their issue; that he wasn’t going to put Judge Judy on there. He was going to put real scholars that they cared about, people they had been advancing for years as potential Supreme Court justices.

Vetted by the Federalist Society?

Vetted by the Federalist Society, people they knew they could trust, people they knew they could rely on; people with track records who weren't going to migrate ideologically the way other Supreme Court nominees had done over the years, to their disappointment. They didn't want any more Souters; they didn't want any more [Sandra Day] O’Connors; they didn't want any more [Anthony] Kennedys.

So are the actions of Mitch McConnell to not give Obama what he wants, even in the face of Merrick Garland—I mean, Obama could have gone one way because you've got a progressive and just kind of say, “All right, I'm going to activate Democrats about this issue in the upcoming election for my friend, Hillary.” But he picks Merrick Garland. It feels like, at least, to try to entice some of the Republican moderates to his side.

Absolutely. Yeah, for President Obama, Merrick Garland is the break-the-glass choice. He’s the one he’d been holding in reserve for a moment like this when he had to overcome Republican resistance. So in his first term, he had a couple more progressive nominees in Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, and he could afford to do that because he had a Democratic Senate. Now with a Republican Senate, he chooses the more moderate candidate, the one who has all kinds of relationships with the Republicans who he thinks, therefore, should be acceptable to them.

And in fact, Merrick Garland is well-known in Washington. He’s well-liked across the aisle. He has a lot of friends among Republicans and conservative judicial activists and judges. In fact, if there was going to be a Democratic choice for the Supreme Court, there probably wasn't a figure that Republicans would like better than Merrick Garland. Doesn't mean he’s conservative, but he was more middle-of-the-road, seen as more centrist, less activist. And in a normal circumstance, Republicans would have jumped at the chance to have Merrick Garland as a Democratic appointee as opposed to somebody who was more liberal, more activist, more full-throated in their advocacy for issues that are anathema to those activists.

… In a way, McConnell is continuing a bet…. I guess maybe he’s got nothing to lose, but he’s thinking, maybe if Trump wins, he’s a guy who will do what we want to do.

Also, it’s a continuation of the McConnell approach to Obama’s presidency anyway as minority leader and then majority leader just in the sense that he’s a “Just say no” kind of guy.

Yeah. I mean, Mitch McConnell had never been Barack Obama’s best friend. They had spent, at this point, seven years fighting over everything from health care to taxes to other Supreme Court justices, and I think Mitch McConnell was certainly not inclined to do President Obama any favors. But it was a gamble, because at that point, almost everybody would have assumed that Donald Trump was not going to win in the general election, that he was a fatally flawed candidate. Hillary Clinton would be elected, and she would pick either Garland again or somebody perhaps much more liberal.

So you probably could imagine in March of 2016 that you could still have Garland after the election in the lame duck if Hillary Clinton won. So you didn't need to rush forward anyway, and there was at least a roll-of-the-dice chance that the Republicans would win and they would have a chance to fill the seat themselves.

It's election night now, and the surprise of all surprises occurs. If you're McConnell, after your initial elation that you've held onto the Senate, comes the second idea, especially if you've been caring about judges all your life, or all your professional life: judges are everything. The Democrats may have the demographics, but we've got the court, right?

Which is the flip of what it had been, of course, in the ’70s and ’80s. It used to be that the liberals had their courts as their check against a calcified conservative political system. Now it was the other way around.

So here he is. Gorsuch makes it, not actually a lot of trouble. But a really important seat comes up, the so-called swing seat. Any sense from your reporting or what you've learned that the White House leaned a little bit on Justice Kennedy, maybe more than leaned a little bit, encouraged him to retire so that the vacancy would be clear before the midterm elections?

Well, the Gorsuch pick actually is important, not just because it fills Antonin Scalia’s seat instead of Merrick Garland, which is a big ideological switch in that sense. It’s also important because it’s meant as a message to Kennedy. It’s meant as a message to Justice Anthony Kennedy that it would be OK to retire under Donald Trump’s presidency because somebody responsible and a reasonable choice will be picked to fill your seat. Gorsuch had been a Kennedy clerk. He’d liked Gorsuch a lot. He had personally flown out to Colorado to swear in Neil Gorsuch as an appeals court judge. And the choice of Gorsuch was a conscious decision by the White House, particularly Don McGahn, to say to Justice Kennedy: “It’s going to be OK. You can trust Donald Trump to put somebody in your seat that you would respect and admire. You don’t have to hold on for four years.”

And presumably Kennedy got that message. He came to the White House for Gorsuch’s swearing in, and within a year, he decides he can step down himself. He's ready to retire. His own time is up, and he feels confident that he will be replaced by somebody that he would not object to. And picking Brett Kavanaugh, of course, is the ultimate nod to Justice Kennedy, another Kennedy clerk, somebody he does respect and admire, being tapped to take the seat he had held for so long.

I think it’s fascinating, because it’s a much more sophisticated ploy than just leaning on the justice and saying it in a—

Other people may tell you otherwise, and you should trust their—if they have good reporting. I don't know of any direct leaning. I think it was a more sophisticated attempt to message the justice. I think a guy like Justice Kennedy, you don’t put the lean on him because it wouldn’t work. It would, in fact, probably backfire. And this is a more subtle way of approaching it. What is Kennedy’s concern as he’s thinking about whether to retire or not? He's concerned about his seat. He’s concerned about whether or not the president he would be giving the seat to was up for picking a serious candidate as opposed to some of the other characters who had surrounded President Trump in his time in office.

… Help me with McGahn as an individual. Is an idea of that level of sophistication really his?

Well, Don McGahn is an interesting choice for White House counsel to begin with because he doesn't have the range of experience you normally see in that kind of a role, that campaign finance lawyer. He’d worked with Trump during the campaign, but he wasn’t one of Washington’s big legal figures. And, in fact, he stumbled early on with some of the initial orders that the president signed that were challenged in court, particularly the travel ban.

People thought that he may not be up to the job. But what he brought to the task, actually, was a singular focus on the idea of putting conservative judges on the court. It was his passion. It was his most important mission, as he saw it, and it was the area where he had the most success. He was widely credited with the selection process that brought Neil Gorsuch to the court. He was widely credited with naming a number of like-minded conservatives for appeals court judges, and he had established a relationship with Mitch McConnell that would be very, very important going forward. Once the Kavanaugh nomination was announced, McGahn was on the phone with McConnell basically every day. It was the two of them as partners in this great campaign to transform the Supreme Court, and they forged a relationship that would be critical to forcing that nomination through.

…The relationship of McGahn to Trump? How did it work in the Oval Office? Was Trump just ceding all this to these guys and saying, “You guys go out and do this,” or was there actual back-and-forth?

You know, the relationship between Trump and McGahn is actually pretty fraught, because he’s constantly pushing McGahn on the Russia investigation. He’s pushing McGahn to maybe fire [Robert] Mueller. “Why can't we get [Jeff] Sessions to do this?” He’s upset with McGahn for holding him back. McGahn at various moments in his tenure is forced to basically either slow-walk the president on decisions he thinks are wrong, or even talk him out of it. And he takes a lot of incoming from this president who doesn’t hold back in expressing his displeasure.

The one area where they obviously have some sort of mind meld is the idea of conservative judges, about judicial appointments. McGahn convinces the president this is an area where he is both creating a legacy for himself as president and helping himself politically by shoring up his Republican credentials in a way that means that the party will stand with him on other issues as well, and Trump buys into that.

And Trump basically outsources the selection of justices to Don McGahn. He doesn't know Neil Gorsuch from Adam. He doesn't know Brett Kavanaugh. But he’s told by Don McGahn these are the guys who will make your conservative supporters happy. And he decides, fine, you get to bring these to me. Now, he makes the final choice. He’s picking between the candidates that McGahn and the Federalist Society have previously vetted, but he accepts that they're the ones who are going to tell him which candidates are acceptable or not.

Help me understand something about McConnell. So as we've reported, and you've certainly reported, in that period after [John] McCain (R-Ariz.) puts the thumbs down and the president is in [Trump National Golf Club in] Bedminster and calling and threatening Mitch McConnell and apparently saying lots of very darkly negative things to him, somehow McConnell survives all of that and collaborates with McGahn and gets Gorsuch through right away, and then Kavanaugh. How does McConnell operate? What is it about him, and how central is he to this process?

McConnell is a real cool customer. Unlike other Republicans who end up getting into fights with President Trump or getting mad at President Trump or feeling hurt at things that President Trump might say, McConnell just, you know, he picks his fights. There are moments where he does, you know, basically tell the president he can't do something, but he’s not going to get in a war with the president of his own party. And he takes the heat for things that other senators might not accept, and he lets it roll off his back.

So the president can berate him on the phone and tell him he’s weak and he’s a failure for not getting the health care repeal through, and McConnell just basically brushes it off. He's got bigger fish to fry than getting into a public squabble with the president. It doesn't mean he likes it. This is not the president he would have chosen. But, you know, it’s a marriage of convenience. And, in fact, his own marriage is involved in this, too. His wife, [Elaine Chao, secretary of transportation], of course, is in the Cabinet. So there's an alliance here that may not be pleasant for him, but is one that he’s determined to use to the best benefit he can.

And he uses his connection to Trump, however hostile it may be at times, to push Trump in ways that he wants the president to move, and he gets through a lot of the time.

So one other McConnell motivational question: Is it about policy, or is it about politics? Is he pushing these judges because he really believes in a conservative court and originalist theory and all of that, or is this winning?

Well, look, McConnell likes to win. Everything is about winning. But I think he understands that the courts are the real game here, the real long-term game; that a Senate will switch back and forth, a House will go back and forth, the White House. But the judges, they're there for life, and if you can get enough people on those courts, you can have more lasting impact on policy in America, you can have a lot more enduring ability to transform America, than you can through legislation or presidential fiat. The president can sign an executive order, but it’s gone the next day if the next president decides to get rid of it. Another Congress can come along and undo anything that Mitch McConnell can put through, but they can't take a judge off the court, and they can't undo a ruling by the Supreme Court.

Now back to Trump, Kavanaugh. The way we hear it, the first meeting isn't wonderful between [him] and Kavanaugh. Then Kavanaugh comes back with his wife, and things get better. What happened there?

Well, I'm not as great on that, but I do know that President Trump was not enamored of Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was a Bushie. He didn't like that. He referred to— “You're a Bush guy.” That’s not, to him, a selling point. And they didn't connect personally, I don't think. He saw Kavanaugh as kind of a creature of the Washington establishment that, in theory anyway, he had come to dismantle. Kavanaugh’s not his kind of guy.

But McGahn kept pushing and pushing and pushing. “Kavanaugh’s the guy. He is the one. He is the one you want. He’s the one that will get you a lot of praise from the people whose opinions you respect and admire.” And so ultimately, he kind of swallows it and decides to go with Kavanaugh. That's over McConnell’s advice. McConnell had warned the president that Kavanaugh might be the toughest of the candidates he was thinking about to get confirmed; that there was a paper trail; that there would be questions about his time in the Bush White House, his time on Ken Starr’s team. He had more decisions as an appeals court judge than some of the other candidates, so McConnell was a little nervous about Brett Kavanaugh as a nominee and had warned the president about that. But in the end, McGahn overcame those doubts and convinced the president that Kavanaugh was the right choice.

…So let’s just talk a little bit about the politics and the reality behind the scenes before we go in front of the cameras. Talk to me a little bit about the war room and about the creation of what they did to get Kavanaugh ready to get through the Congress.

Well, they create a much bigger war room for Kavanaugh than they had done for Gorsuch because they knew he would be a bigger fight. For one thing, his appointment would actually change the ideological makeup of the court. It would change the balance of power in the way that Gorsuch didn’t. Gorsuch took over for Scalia. They were more or less [of] similar philosophy, so therefore, the same balance of power hadn’t changed. Kavanaugh would be taking over for the swing vote and moving the court over to the right, so they knew the fight would be bigger.

They create a war room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. They staff it with about 10 or 11 lawyers who work full-time, not to mention the folks at the Justice Department and others who were going to be working on this nomination. And they begin all the things that they would do for a big fight. They gather all of his opinions, his record. They start looking through the documents that would tie the previous parts of his career. And they begin to set up these mock hearings, you know, where they bring in lawyers from the outside and some people from the White House to pretend to be senators and throw questions at Kavanaugh, sometimes for hours at a time— “What about this? What about that? ”—to see how he would respond.

And Kavanaugh’s a bright guy, he's experienced in Washington, and he’s pretty comfortable in that kind of setting, and I think he impressed some of the people who were involved with these mock hearings as somebody who would be able to get through them. But it was a tough ordeal for him and for the people around him to get him ready for these hearings.

They look to this as a campaign. So in addition to trying to prepare him for the hearings, they were trying to prepare the ground that he would be walking on. And they wanted to go after senators in red states, Democrats in particular, who might be persuaded to vote for him because they were going to go home to constituents who supported Donald Trump. And they recruited surrogates to go talk about Kavanaugh. They placed about 600 op-ed articles in papers around the country in places like Maine where Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, is from, places like Montana where Jon Tester, a more conservative Democrat, was from. And they wanted to basically create an environment in which it would be impossible for Republicans and hard for centrist Democrats to vote against Kavanaugh.

Is that operation run from the White House? Is that a McGahn-generated idea, or is that McConnell and others?

Well, it’s really a White House operation. It has been traditionally now since going back to the days of Bork and Clarence Thomas when you had Ken Duberstein and John Danforth trying to get these nominees through the Senate. With each passing nomination, it becomes more sophisticated, more elaborate, more extensive, more intense, more partisan. And in the past, they didn't have to worry about social media. This time, they're trying to figure out social media strategy here. How were they going to sell Kavanaugh to the people? It used to be you had to convince people that a nominee was a serious legal person, but in today’s environment, you have to also persuade them that they're a politically reliable person. And it’s a really interesting line between judicial propriety and modern electoral campaign style.

So let’s go to the first day. I like to watch that video of the very first day as [Chuck] Grassley (R-Iowa) walks him in to the table. All the photographers are there. They move away; he goes back, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Somebody we talked to said they counted the words that Grassley got out before the explosion happened from the Democratic side of the table. And in lots of ways, whenever I watch it, it’s like a sort of microcosm of our politics writ large when this moment happens. Describe for me what the forces are that are happening around that first day.

Well, this is not a law school symposium where we're going to test constitutional theories. This is raw politics. This is a fight for control of the Supreme Court, and Democrats aren’t going to lay down for it, and they immediately start going after Judge Kavanaugh from the very beginning, and they have ammunition. “What about your time with Ken Starr? Why were you arguing for this kind of an examination of President Clinton? Weren't you hypocritical when you later said the president should be immune from criminal prosecution while in office? What about your time with President Bush? What did you have to do with the Iraq War? What did you have to do with a particular episode that got Sen. [Patrick] Leahy (D-Vt.), in particular, worked up” that everybody else in the world had forgotten about, but he hadn't, when Democratic computers were hacked by Republicans back in the Bush era on the Hill, and what did Brett Kavanaugh know about it? “What about this memo? Doesn’t this mean that you actually knew this had been wrongly penetrated?”

And I think to average voters back home, some of it might have seemed a little confusing and hard to follow. But it became basically an all-out war from the very beginning. Kavanaugh might get through, he probably had the votes, but they weren't going to make it easy, and they were going to try to push every issue they could to make sure that he had to answer their questions.

And describe what's going on with the Republicans on the committee at that time.

How do you mean?

Well, somebody told us that if you get to the table, you're 90 percent there, and the Democrats really aren’t going to be able to stop you at all.

No, it’s four-corner basketball, right? You hold onto the ball until the buzzer sounds. And if you're the Republicans, you have the majority. As long as you don’t lose any of your people, you're going to get him through. So it’s defense. It’s make sure that you can deflect anything that might be too damaging. Help the nominee who’s testifying rehabilitate himself with helpful softball questions meant to counter anything that the other side has just thrown at him, and get through the day.

There are some, like Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and others who are on the committee who, when it seems like they're about to go to the finish line and the information breaks about Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein (D-Calif.) having an anonymous letter, start to have probably a tremendous sense of déjà vu going back to the Anita Hill weekend.

There's some remarkable parallels here. It had to be eerie for anybody who lived through both of them.

So take me there. How does it happen? I mean, how does she have a letter she hasn’t used? It’s there; it’s breaking. The newspapers start to cover it. The world says, “I've seen this movie before.”

Well, Sen. Feinstein had received a letter back in the summer from a woman in California, her home state, saying that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her back in high school, but she didn't want the senator to make it public or use her name in any kind of hearing or anything like that. So for Feinstein, it was kind of an awkward situation. What do you do with this information if you're not allowed to pursue it? If you can't give the woman’s name to the FBI to investigate, what are you supposed to do with this?

And she ended up sitting on it, which becomes, of course, very controversial. Her argument is: “I had no choice. What was I supposed to do?” But to Republicans, and even some fellow Democrats, it was an odd choice. If you had this explosive information, shouldn’t it have been brought out during the vetting process before we get to the point where we're about to vote?

They're in these last few days; the hearings have already been held. It looks like we're heading toward a positive vote for Kavanaugh in the committee. And then you begin to see the newspapers sort of vague references to anonymous allegations that had been lodged against Brett Kavanaugh about his conduct. And there's no name at first. The details are sparse. People don’t know what to make of it. Is this really going to be something that's going to blow up or not? The story isn't out front.

And then Christine Blasey Ford comes forward, and she gives an interview to The Washington Post. And The Washington Post had talked with her off and on over the last few months, but she had never allowed them to quote her on the record or anything like that. But as these vague, sketchy reports begin coming out in the media, she decides it’s time to go on the record, and she tells her story to The Washington Post, which then publishes it on a weekend, on a Sunday, and then suddenly everything blows up. Suddenly this is a completely different nomination.

He, after all this sort of breaks, what do we know about the president’s response to the early reports before Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony? The president who already had some uncertainty about Kavanaugh now hears this. It has faint resonance to his own problems in this world. What's his response? What's going on in the Oval Office during this moment?

Well, President Trump has never been fully committed to Kavanaugh. He never invested in him in a personal way up to this point. And, you know, he’s wondering whether or not this is going to cause the nomination to go down, and he’s asking questions about it and trying to figure out whether he needs to pull the plug. There is a resonance for him, who of course had been accused himself of multiple instances of sexual impropriety, so he’s not automatically inclined to take the side of accusers and go against somebody who’s been accused. He sees too much of himself in that kind of situation. But he wasn’t devoted to Kavanaugh either, and it was very possible that this could have gone a different way.

McConnell, of course, is playing against the clock. He’s got midterm elections in October. They’ve sort of done away with the August recess. He's trying to keep things moving. He understands that when something like this rises up, you don’t want to give a lot of time. He’s looking back in the Journal at what happened with Anita Hill and says we don’t really want other accusers to come forward. The more time we have, the more likely other stuff is going to come up. What's he up against, and what are he and the Republicans up against in that week before the testimony of Blasey Ford?

Well, you're right. The clock is ticking. They're heading into a midterm fall campaign. The last thing they want to do is fight that campaign on the ground of sexual harassment. Remember with the Clarence Thomas hearings, that came a year before the election and yet still was a powerful force that worked against Republicans in 1992. The last thing they want to do is go into September with this being the issue everybody’s talking about, particularly in the #MeToo moment. This had been a whole new issue from the point of view of America. Whatever tolerance there might have been in the past for people who had been accused of things like that, that had gone away. Major figures in American life have been toppled in the previous months for allegations sometimes less than what Brett Kavanaugh was being accused of, people in the media, people in industry, Hollywood, business, politics, and this just looked like it was going to be one more of those situations, one more #MeToo moment, and Republicans would be caught on the wrong end of that. Remember, they had lost a Senate seat in Alabama on sexual impropriety allegations, a Senate seat that should only be Republican based on demographics and history. And so they were very, very worried about this.

And for McConnell, the trick was get it moving, get this voted on. Get it done, move on, and let’s get the conversation and the campaign on to something else more favorable to us like the economy or taxes or something like that.

Because when he’s watching, he’s also counting heads, and [Jeff] Flake’s (R-Ariz.) one of his swing votes, but also Collins and Murkowski, very important to him. Women in this moment really count.

He’s got the narrowest of majorities: 51 votes out of 100. He loses two senators, and it’s done. Who are those two senators? Well, Susan Collins from Maine, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska—both moderates, both women, both people who had defied President Trump before on health care or other issues. And the last thing that Sen. McConnell wanted was for sexual harassment to become the defining issue for this Supreme Court nomination and to lose those senators and find himself on the losing end of a Supreme Court nomination fight.

In terms of a career, as we look back at it, it is the maximum-peril moment for Mitch McConnell.

Yeah, it is. He’s never—on any Supreme Court case before, he’s never faced a fight like this. He never faced one where he could go down like this. And it was right there on the razor’s edge, and it definitely could have gone either way.

One of the things that happens is Kavanaugh gives an interview seated next to his wife to Fox News. I gather it wasn’t well received in the Oval Office?

Yeah. This had never happened before, right? You can't think of another instance where a Supreme Court nominee has gone on television to give an interview during the confirmation process. It’s unthinkable. That's not what we do. They don’t talk. They speak at hearings, and otherwise they keep quiet. That's the tradition; that's the protocol. The idea here was the environment’s changed so much, you had immediate—was a new way of doing business. And that would mean going on television and answering these charges. Where else would you go? Fox News, the president’s favorite network, where they hoped, anyway, they would be speaking to Republican senators and conservative voters and shoring up any doubts that were emerging about their nominee.

So Judge Kavanaugh sits down for an interview with Fox News with his wife, and it’s meant to humanize him. It’s meant to reassure people he wasn’t the kind of person he was accused of being. And he denies the allegations and expresses his views about them. But in the Oval Office, he is seen as passive. He is seen as too soft. President Trump wants somebody to be a fighter. President Trump wants somebody to be like him, right, somebody who gives as good as he gets. And Kavanaugh didn't do that. Kavanaugh was relatively subdued in the way he presented himself on camera.

Trump wanted him to get out there and fight back. He wanted him to be outraged. He wanted him to show anger and resolve, and this was communicated to Judge Kavanaugh.

So he’s at even more peril. He and Mitch and everybody who’s got an oar in the water here is in even more peril now than they were when the information was first coming out in the Post and other places.

Well, and part of the peril is they don’t know what the president himself is going to do. Is it possible the president might pull the plug? He says no, but do they know that? He's a very mercurial president to begin with, prone to changing his mind and not given to predictable courses of action. So at any moment, they believe, it’s possible President Trump could decide he’s going to go a different direction. So they need to convince the Republican senators, and they also need to convince the president.

Dr. Ford delivers her testimony. A lot of places where I was that day, you could hear a pin drop. It was just literally people riveted by it. What was the response in the Oval Office to Ford’s testimony?

Well, even President Trump thought she seemed credible. He listened to what she had to say, and she came across as a very sincere and forthright person. Nobody laid a glove on her; nobody really undercut her story. It didn't mean she had corroborating proof. But in the Oval Office, she was seen as a very damaging witness. In fact, for part of the morning, there was a real gloom inside the White House, a real sense that they were lost. One Republican who was involved in all this texted us and said, “Disaster.” This looked like to them this was going to have to either be pulled or go down in a negative vote. She was so credible, so compelling that they didn't see how they could possibly salvage the nomination.

Where was Kavanaugh while she's testifying, and who’s with him?

Kavanaugh’s watching this from a Senate office building nearby the hearing room, and he’s there with Don McGahn, and he’s there with his wife, and he’s there with a handful of other advisers. And, you know, he’s holed up in there increasingly angry at what he's seeing. He's being portrayed as something that he doesn't think he is—as a monster—and he’s very agitated about this. Don McGahn gives him some advice. Well, first of all, the president tries to get hold of McGahn to say, “Well, maybe we should have this FBI investigation after all.” McGahn won't take the call. He knows what's about to happen. If he doesn't take the call, maybe he can put this off.

Instead, he focuses his attention on Kavanaugh. He says: “You’ve got to get out there and show this indignation. You have to get out there and show them that this makes you angry because it’s not true. Otherwise, they're going to think it is true, and you're sunk; you're done.”

And he’s really talking to an audience of one anyway at that moment?

Yes. Well, there are two audiences, right? There's the audience in the Oval Office, and then there's the audience in the hearing room. And it didn't take much convincing. Kavanaugh was really worked up. He was, in fact, indignant and outraged. So when he goes out into the hearing room for the afternoon testimony, he’s all primed and pumped up and ready to express that sort of boiling resentment that he’s feeling inside.

And when you talk to Flake and the men on the Republican side, even some of the people on the Democratic side, they say, “I get it with the anger.” I think Flake said: “I’d like to believe that's what I’d do. I didn't want a [Michael] Dukakis moment from this guy. I wanted somebody who was, you know—”

Exactly. Well, if you were wrongly accused, if you're wrongly accused, what would your reaction be? Your reaction would be anger, right? “How can you portray me as a monster when I'm nothing like that?” So that's what senators wanted to hear from him if they were going to be convinced there was no truth to these allegations. The trick was he went so far, so much angrier than anybody had ever seen in a Supreme Court nominee in public—except for, perhaps, with Clarence Thomas—that he risked going too far. In fact, when he went back in the holding room during a break, McGahn had to at this point kind of calm him down a little bit, say: “OK, you need to dial it back just a little bit here. This is a little too far.” At one point, Kavanaugh had even gotten into a testy back-and-forth with a Democratic senator [Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar] over whether she drank beer or not, which is not the kind of thing that you do as a nominee seeking a vote from a committee. And he had to go back out after McGahn kind of calmed him down a little bit to apologize to the senator for taking it too far.

I mean, he was not only intemperate—we like our judges to be cool under pressure, I guess—but also the accusations about the Clintons and all of that, it was just—

Well, it came across as conspiratorial. This is all about the Clintons? You know, to Democrats he seemed unhinged almost. He seemed to have gone too far. And the issue almost kind of changed a little bit from what he did as a teenager to what he was doing right then and there in the hearing room. Was this somebody who had the judicial deportment that we expect to have on the Supreme Court or not?

For Republicans who were despondent in the morning, they suddenly found this as a rallying cry. They found new energy in wanting to defend this guy, and they adopted his anger as their own.

Let’s talk a little bit about Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Lindsey Graham is the one guy who doesn't give up on him. You know, so after the morning and Christine Blasey Ford has testified, the Republicans were all very subdued, very uncertain about where this is going to go. She seems so credible, how could they possibly confirm him given what she's just said? Nobody has managed to really fully undercut her story, and the mood at that moment among Republicans was almost despondent.

And then comes Lindsey Graham. He comes out to the cameras in the hall, and he launches a very, very powerful, tough, strong defense of Judge Kavanaugh. And in a way, he begins to kind of rally his own fellow Republicans. “Wait a second, this isn't over yet. We should fight. This is wrong. He’s being unfairly accused.” And so when the judge comes and gives his testimony, you know, he's playing to where Lindsey Graham already is. And then Lindsey Graham just jumps on in there and takes it up even further to the point where he's almost screaming at his Democratic colleagues— “How can you do this?" —just full of outrage and resentment and grievance to the point where his anger is almost hard to watch.

But it serves to rally Republicans and make it an us-versus-them kind of issue. And if it’s an us-versus-them kind of issue, when you have the majority, that's what you want.

I missed a stitch. Let’s go back and get it. In the intermission between her testimony and Kavanaugh coming out, while he's in the room, Trump talks to McConnell. What transpires?

Well, there was uncertainty. I think both of them are kind of testing each other a little bit. “Where are you at on this? How strong are you?” And McConnell basically says to the president: “You don’t worry about me. I'm strong as mule piss.” That's his quote. “I'm strong as mule piss.” In other words, he’s not going to let up. He’s not going to give up; he’s not going to surrender. And that fortifies the president. Any doubts the president had that McConnell would be there and help push him through were gone by this point. And the two of them, in effect, join hands and decided they were going to keep fighting.

This is where McConnell legendarily says, “It’s only halftime. It’s halftime.”

He does, yeah. So the president is uncertain about where this is going to go. Blasey Ford seems so credible. And when he’s talking to McConnell, McConnell reassures him, “It’s only halftime.” McConnell understands they still have a chance with Kavanaugh’s testimony to turn this around, but he has to reassure the president, because we don’t know where the president is going to go with this.

So once that hearing is over, let’s think about the swing voters and others on the committee. They go to McConnell’s office; there's a conversation. Can you take me inside that conversation?

Yeah. I mean, there are three or four senators at this point who are really on the fence about this; mainly Jeff Flake from Arizona, who’s an outspoken opponent of President Trump to begin with, and Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, two moderate Republicans who had been willing to break with the president at the time. And they're very troubled by this testimony. They don’t know how to reconcile her credibility with his anger.

And up until this point, the president and the Republican leadership in the Senate had resisted dragging this on by having the FBI take a look at these allegations. “Why do we need to do that? We can do that ourselves through our hearing.” That was their argument. Well, at this point, they were on the edge of losing the vote. Flake and Collins and Murkowski, as well as Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, decide to push for this, an FBI investigation; that their way of trying to resolve this is to say, “Let’s have somebody who’s a professional look at this.” That gets them out of an immediate vote and helps them look like they're taking this very seriously for whatever vote they eventually cast. That wasn’t the president’s first choice, but he agrees to go along with a limited, quick FBI investigation in order to try to satisfy them.

Talk a little bit about Flake in the elevator being challenged by—

So the morning after the testimony, the committee meets to discuss what they're going to do about the nomination, and Jeff Flake, who had been on the fence, announces that he is planning to vote for Kavanaugh to advance out of the committee to the floor. And this is a big moment. If he stands by Kavanaugh, then very likely some of the other balky Republicans would, too, and they might be able to push him through.

Flake leaves the hearing. He’s heading back to his office. Flake is getting on the elevator, and two women who said they had also been sexual assault victims confront him. “How can you do this? I believe her story because I know it’s my story. You have family yourself. How could you do this?” And he said, “I need to go; I need to go.” But they're very much in his face, tearful, emotional, real.

And Flake is moved by this. He can't help but be moved by this. And the elevator doors close, and his mind begins to work. And by the afternoon, he’s no longer so comfortable with the decision he had just announced that morning, that he’s going to support Kavanaugh to move to the floor. He announces that just because he’s going to do that does not mean he’s going to support him for confirmation at the end of the day, and he wants there to be further investigation; that he’s still troubled by these allegations. And rarely have you seen a moment where a hallway elevator confrontation like that has such an impact on the course of events in the United States Senate.

So if you're McConnell and you're sitting there and you've had these conversations, you're carefully guiding Collins, you're trying not to push her too hard because she doesn't like to be pushed.

Right, exactly.

You've got Flake, who’s a kind of wild card. What's going to happen with Murkowski, who’s a black box? You don’t really know what's going to happen there. And now this starts to happen, and the group is sitting there, and is the committee even going to vote it out? Grassley seems sort of stunned, and people are standing up and walking out of the room and walking back in, and there's a thing in a phone booth with [Chris] Coons (D-Del.) and Flake, and it just seems like a circus.

Coons and Flake, right, exactly. No, the whole thing is kind of like unraveling, right? For Mitch McConnell, who likes a nice, orderly process, suddenly this thing is all out of control, and he’s watching things that he cannot shape necessarily. And he’s very smart about this because he understands what you need with each senator. What works with one senator is not going to work with another. What works with most Republican senators would not work with, say, Susan Collins, as you say. She knows her own mind; she doesn't like being pushed. You’ve got to approach her in a different way than you might one of your other Republicans.

So he’s watching this, and he knows that if he loses Flake suddenly, they're at 50/50. And that means a vice presidential tiebreaker, Mike Pence. If you lose a second senator, they're done. They don’t have a majority anymore. So this elevator confrontation has a real impact.

Yeah. So they do the investigation. The senators come in and read it. It takes up another few days. And so far, I gather there's a real effort to keep the president from going out and saying something derisive about Blasey Ford, keeping his cool, keep him off Twitter.

Yeah. Through all of this, the president’s aides have been trying to keep him from engaging too strongly in the fight. They're worried that he would say something so provocative or incendiary, insulting to the women who were making these accusations, that it would backfire; that it would turn a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski against them rather than for them. And for the most part, he had acceded to that. For the most part, he did what they asked.

But then one night, he's in Mississippi; he’s giving a campaign rally, and he just goes off. He just starts mocking Christine Blasey Ford, basically suggesting that she had made it up, that “Oh, she can't say this; she can't say that.” And it’s true. She has no corroborating witnesses who have said that they saw anything like that. People who she said were in the house don’t remember it, and President Trump begins to mock that in a very derisive way.

And that has a potential to be a turning point. The next day, the Republican senators who were on the fence were really turned off by this. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, they don’t like this. This is not what they want to see. The president later asserts that this was a key moment actually for the good, because it, he says, it reinforces Republicans for Kavanaugh. But I don't think that's the case. I think that he—ultimately Kavanaugh wins despite this, not because of this. This is the moment where the president is playing with fire. We're in this #MeToo moment, and the assumption is you shouldn’t question women who have been victimized, that you should treat them with respect and dignity. And here he was in a very, very derisive way mocking her in front of a crowd, which is just lapping it up and cheering and shouting. And it had the potential to really actually sink the nomination. It’s extraordinary, in a way, that it didn't.

As the vote is looming, Susan Collins, for whom the stakes are high as a woman and as a senator and as somebody who’s going to be up for re-election, it’s a moment and all of it, she kind of super-studies it the way she does. She's having lunch in the Senate dining room, and Grassley and McConnell join her, and what she says, at least as it’s reported, causes Grassley to break down and cry. And what she says is, “I'm going to vote for Kavanaugh.”

I guess I sort of remember that, but I don't remember that in detail. You know, Susan Collins is the one they need the most, because if they get her, they probably get Murkowski. And she's a very thoughtful person. She's not predictable. She likes to be independent, and she's going through the evidence. She spends time going through the FBI interviews that were done, not just the top line, but the actual interviews that are recorded in these documents that are sent to the Hill trying to figure out is there anything here that helps her decide between these two conflicting accounts?

And ultimately, she decides that while Christine Blasey Ford is credible, there's nothing else there to support her, and she can't, therefore, decide that Brett Kavanaugh is lying without greater evidence. She gives him the benefit of the doubt, in effect. And it’s a big decision. And when she does make that decision, Chuck Grassley knows this is the key thing. This is what's really going to turn it.

During this time, she tells us about death threats, dismemberment threats, people waiting for her at her condo when she arrives in a rainstorm; that it’s just terrifying to her… It just feels like the old days in lots of ways in terms of anger, fear, vitriol. What is going on?

Well, there's a lot of anger out there, and there are these protesters. In fact, people are getting in people’s faces a lot more than they used to. And it’s intimidating on some level to be on the receiving end of that. In some ways, I think it actually helped McConnell, because he tried to make that the issue with his senators rather than whatever Brett Kavanaugh might have done 35 years ago. “Are you going to be intimidated by the mob? Are you going to let these people tell you what to do? Don’t you find this outrageous, what they're doing to you?”

And that becomes a useful argument for McConnell with his Republican senators, a resentment of the pressure that they were being put under by activists and people who were following them in the halls and following them to their homes.

… A lot of other people worry a lot about now that the court is politicized in a really overt and obvious way, it was a political campaign, not a confirmation hearing, a test of the qualifications and character of the nominee, but the political acumen and what side are you on and how fierce will you be defending certain kind of politics moment. So there's a lot of people, certainly a lot of people we talked to, who say, “Something’s really different forever because of this.” What are your thoughts about that?

I mean, it was the culmination of a really decades-long campaign now by both sides to shape the judiciary, shape the Supreme Court, knowing that would shape the country as a whole. A lot of money goes into this now; a lot of campaign-style techniques are used. This is not a scholarly process. This is not an ivory-tower assessment of constitutional views. It’s all-out war, and both sides are determined to win it.

During the Obama years, we talk about McConnell and the Scalia seat, but what’s his approach overall during those years as far as judicial confirmations? How important was that to him when he was minority leader and as majority leader?

Yeah. I mean, McConnell always prioritized, I think, judicial nominations, and he did what he could during the Obama years to shape those. He didn't have the opportunity that he would later have, obviously, as majority leader.

The other part of that I want to ask is about the Trump years. We've heard that McConnell prioritized the judicial nominations above everything else and that at the White House, there was frustration. Even other nominations, McConnell was putting all of his firepower. Can you tell us about that?

That's true. McConnell prioritized judicial nominations over all else, even other presidential nominations, because look, you put a judge on the court, he’s there for life. You put someone in a Cabinet agency, they're there for at most four years, maybe sometimes two. In this administration, they could be there just for a few months. So for him, the long game was the courts, not an ambassadorship to Luxembourg or a deputy secretary of agriculture. So that would be frustrating to people in the administration who need these other positions filled, but Mitch McConnell is playing the long game.

When President Trump introduces Kavanaugh as the nominee, to what extent is the Kavanaugh creation of the post-Bork conservative Federalist legal movement?

I mean, Brett Kavanaugh, in fact, is in some way the exemplar of what the Federalist Society was out to do, which was to take somebody smart, young, capable, help groom him, help make sure we advance somebody who builds a track record that we can rely on, somebody who shares our views and our values. And in some ways, his nomination is the culmination of what the Federalist Society guys have been trying to do for many years.

In that moment when Kavanaugh speaks after Trump, he sort of pays tribute to Trump and what an amazing search process he’s done. Do you remember that moment or what—is it McGahn [who] has prepared him that this is in the Trump world?

To flatter the guy?

Yeah.

I don't know specifically. Kavanaugh’s a smart guy. I'm sure he understood that the coin of the realm in this particular presidency is flattering the president. I mean, Trump is not Kavanaugh’s kind of Republican, you know, I think it’s safe to say. He was a judge, so he wasn’t a partisan figure. He wasn’t making speeches or becoming a Never Trumper. But I've known Kavanaugh going back a number of years, and I don't think Trump is his kind of Republican. But he was his opportunity to get on the Supreme Court, and that was something he wasn’t going to pass up.

We might start the film with this sort of awkward meeting, McConnell meeting Kavanaugh at the Capitol, and they're standing there for a photo op. For Mitch McConnell, who has been in Congress and prioritized the Supreme Court, how important is that nomination of Kavanaugh to the Kennedy seat for McConnell’s legacy when he’s standing there?

Yeah, so for Mitch McConnell standing there with Brett Kavanaugh, he sees his legacy standing right there in front of him. He has a chance to finally change the outlook of the Supreme Court, to move the center of the court to the right, to bring the values he cares about to the nation’s highest court. Brett Kavanaugh is the one who’s going to be able to do it for him. As long as he can get him confirmed, he will have made a change that would last for years, if not decades.

There's another moment that stands out, is when McConnell comes out after the Blasey Ford allegations, and he says, “We've got an all-male Judiciary Committee, but we have a female assistant who’s going to be there,” and it sort of embodies the awkwardness in the post-Thomas/Anita Hill world.

#MeToo moment, yeah.

Can you just help us with that moment and McConnell with the Republicans and the sort of politics that they're facing? Is that a moment of peril for them?

Yeah. I mean, here they are facing a situation not that different from the one they had faced with Clarence Thomas, and the court committee looks, on their side of the aisle anyway, pretty much the same as it did in 1991—all men, all white men, you know, judging a woman on her allegations. That did not work out well for them with Anita Hill, and they were determined to try to avoid that again. So that’s why they hire this investigator from New Mexico, a woman who has experience in sex crimes, to do the questioning in hopes of not having septuagenarian white guys grilling a woman about the most painful subject they could imagine.

It doesn't work in the sense that the investigator never develops a rhythm to her questioning that is of any consequence. And ultimately, by the time Judge Kavanaugh returns in the afternoon, the Republican senators just dispense with her and just start questioning themselves all over again because they can't resist any further. So it was a gamble to avoid the disaster of what they saw happen in 1991. To the extent that it avoided something bad, perhaps you could say it worked. It didn’t succeed in the sense that it didn't really undercut Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in that moment.

My last question is: that afternoon when Kavanaugh comes back to the hearing room and he hits these what seem like partisan political points about the Clintons, about anger over Trump, and it seems like he’s rallying sort of a partisan support for himself, after so many judges have gone before the Judiciary Committee and said, “I don’t wear a D on my sleeve or an R on my sleeve,” is there significance in that moment and legitimacy of the court?

I mean, when he starts talking about the Clintons and this is revenge for the 2016 election, I think this is sort of a revealing moment that, in fact, politics is part of the judicial process. Previous nominees wouldn’t refer to elections or candidates like that. But I think Kavanaugh really genuinely believed this was about politics and he was being targeted as a result of that. In effect, by raising that grievance, he was himself, of course, inserting politics into the equation as well.

Now, that may simply be pulling back a curtain on something that was always there, but it was kind of a jarring moment where we don’t normally see that kind of a reference in a Judiciary Committee hearing for a Supreme Court justice.

When Blasey Ford comes forward, how do the Republicans view it? Are they seeing this as a setup, as a political move?

I mean, when Christine Blasey Ford comes forward, there's among the Republicans obviously a fear about what she might have to say, but there's also resentment about the way this has come about. There was resentment at Dianne Feinstein for holding back until the last minute. To them it looks like a setup. Why did she not tell them about it until the last minute? Now, she had her explanation. She was constrained by the wishes of the letter writer. But to the Republicans it smelled suspicious. It looked like a political hit job, and that colored their view of this from the start. Instead of trying to say, “Well, is there something here?” the first instinct is: “What are the Democrats up to? What are they trying to do to us, and how are they trying to put us on the spot?”

Just to repeat something that we've talked about, but just wanted to see if you had one more thing to say, is with the judicial nominations, McConnell’s tactics both in the Obama years where he stalled and stalled and stalled to the extent that they had over 100 open spaces by the time Trump came in, and when Trump comes in, pushing things forward and to the point of even changing the number of votes, I guess, to get back at [Harry] Reid (D-Nev.) to some extent. Just talk a little bit about his tactics to accomplish the goals that he had.

Nobody understands how the Senate works better than Mitch McConnell, and he understands how to slow-walk a Democratic president’s judicial nominees, and he understands how to fast-track a Republican president’s nominees. So if you're a president, you want Mitch McConnell on your side, not against you. He obviously was perfectly willing to change the rules on the number of votes needed to confirm a Supreme Court justice. He had the precedent of the Democrats basically doing the same thing for lower-court nominees.

Part of what was happening here was that both sides were changing the rules of the game and then using the fact that the other guys had done it to change them further, right? And so with each passing administration, each new nomination, we were heading further and further down the road toward this idea that a nomination is just one more political fight, and if the rules have to be changed in order to win it, so be it.

Now, what Harry Reid would tell you is he had no choice but to change the rules in order to get over Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism. What Mitch McConnell would tell you is, "Why shouldn’t I change the rules for the Supreme Court given the Democrats had done the very same thing on these other judges?" And what neither side was saying was: “Hey, what's the best process here? How can we both work together? How can we recognize that I may be in power today, but I won't be tomorrow, so what's the process that would suit both sides no matter which seats we happen to be sitting in?”

Sen. Collins’ speech making the announcement: What she did, it went on for an hour. It had huge effect. Take us into that just a little bit more.

Sen. Collins’ speech on the floor was the defining moment in some ways for the Republicans’ decision on this. They couldn’t have had a better person outline the case for Kavanaugh and approving him despite these allegations than Susan Collins. Imagine if some older white guy had gotten up there to say, “I don't believe her, and I believe him.” That wouldn't have had the power. In fact, it would have probably produced a backlash. Collins came across as thoughtful; she came across as somebody who had considered both sides, who was not, in fact, trashing Dr. Blasey Ford but was making the argument that the benefit of the doubt had to go to Judge Kavanaugh absent further evidence.

And it was very disappointing to a lot of liberals who had banked on her. But it was probably the most powerful statement the Republicans could have in order to get Kavanaugh through.

Boy, I’ll say.