The Kavanaugh battle was historically ugly. Blame a congress that was ready to foil it.

Republicans have their guy at the Supreme Court. But no one in Washington is happy with Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

This is because Congress was forced to deal with an issue for which it was extremely poorly equipped – an allegation of sexual assault that resulted in a party's desire to control the court for perhaps a generation.

Everything went wrong from the beginning. An elector concerned about Kavanaugh and wishing to remain anonymous would never have hoped to stay in that environment for a long time. Rumors about Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that Kavanaugh allegedly attempted to rape her in high school would have circulated among Democratic members of the Senate, but they could not prevent Kavanaugh's candidacy from leaving the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A week before the committee vote to advance Kavanaugh's candidacy, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) Appeared to be forced by Democratic colleagues to do something with the letter. She made a cryptic public statement that she had handed over Something Kavanaugh's past, essentially confirming the existence of the allegation.

From there, the hunt was open to find out who had done it. That Sunday, Ford decided to go public as the journalists invaded his classroom and his home.

Feinstein denies that his staff disclosed Ford's name. But the leak has propelled allegations ending a career against Kavanaugh in the public sphere at the last minute. His fellow Democrats said Feinstein was in an impossible situation, and they are right. In Congress, there are no rules governing the management of such an explosive letter from an elector. Where is the link between respect for a victim of sexual assault, civic duty and politics? It may not exist.

After Ford said it wanted to testify, it was the turn of the Republicans not to grasp the sensitivity of the situation. Republican leaders said they were going ahead with Kavanaugh's confirmation no matter what Ford was saying. In fact, it was not even clear that they were going to hear it outside. Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) voted blindly to pressure other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing for Ford.

If the goal was to discover the truth, the audience was a disaster. Republican senators would not even question Ford, hiring a prosecutor to question him in five-minute increments, punctuated by Democrats asking their own partisan questions. "Was it a trial?", I wrote at the time. "A committee hearing? A show? It was as if all three were together.

Polls showed that more Americans believed Ford than Kavanaugh. Yet the politicians – mostly Republicans, all men – did not seem to stop saying abominable things about Ford. More and more accusers have told less corroborated stories, and Congress had no idea how to approach them. Apart from a thorough investigation by the police, what should be determined to determine whether a charge against a Supreme Court candidate is credible?

The charges gave the Republicans a powerful argument that the Democrats were preparing them to confirm Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Ford rejected this assertion in her testimony, claiming that "I am not a pawn of anyone" and that she was "100%" certain that Kavanaugh was his attacker. But Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Have still repeated it. A seat on the Supreme Court a few weeks before the mid-term elections was online.

Finally, as protesters faced with tears Senators in the elevators of live national television and as conservative men complained of the attack on Kavanaugh, Congress asked for outside help. The vast majority of senators on both sides were too entrenched to make sense of a last-minute FBI background check in Ford's history and that of another accuser.

In the end, Kavanaugh was confirmed by a margin as fine as the razor. We do not need polls to tell us that, whether you like it or not on the court, the nation feels deeply divided.

"I have urged the President to appoint a woman," said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) A few days before the final vote, while he pleaded with tear and desperation for that to happen. America dissociates gender debate from Kavanaugh's candidacy. "Part of my argument was then that the very important #MeToo movement was also very new and that this Senate was not at all prepared to handle the allegations of sexual harassment and aggression that could have been made . "

He was so right. Kavanaugh's confirmation process began with a partisan reflex. This has turned into something much more difficult to handle: perhaps the biggest test to date of the #MeToo era: what burden of proof should be placed on the accused, rather than to the accuser. Congress, already torn apart, tired and rooted in partisanship, was arguably the worst place to deal with this issue. And that showed.