Wish you'd just fuck off, Brett. Credit: AARON P. BERNSTEIN / GETTY IMAGES
Wish youd just fuck off, Brett.
Wish you’d just fuck off, Brett. AARON P. BERNSTEIN / GETTY IMAGES

The FBI report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was delivered to the Senate last night. Behind closed doors, Senators and select aides with security clearance took turns reviewing the single copy of the document. When Republicans emerged, they declared a victory—this report proved nothing, it was a waste of time, let’s go ahead with the nomination. Democrats, on the other hand, believe the White House strangled the report, limited its scope, and had a strong influence in its overall “bullshit”-ness as one Senator put it.

So now what?

According to several reports, the FBI didn’t interview any of Kavanaugh’s former classmates, despite the fact that some of those classmates called the FBI to let them know that they were available to testify. The Republicans are saying the investigation was thorough, but how thorough could it have been? We may never know for ourselves, since there’s still only one copy and it’s apparently not supposed to be leaked to the public. The White House could release it, but what are the odds of that happening?

This afternoon a group of Republican Senators made their case in a press conference. There was a lot of thinning white hair in the room, and several jowls shook with impassioned empathy rage for Kavanaugh. There was a lot of talk about the horrors of sexual assault, and a lot of dubious and condescending claims about treating Dr. Christine Blasey Ford the way they would treat their own daughters. If they’d elect their daughters’ alleged abuser to the highest court in the land, then I feel sorry for those daughters.

Throughout the press conference, ignoring how each Senator waiting their turn at the mic looked like a slightly smudged photocopy of whichever Senator was speaking, I detected an undercurrent of disdain in all of their answers. This was confirmed when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley took a moment to chastise the media:

On the other side of things are the Democrats.

Additionally, there’s this:

And, though it’s hardly the worst of his crimes, why aren’t we paying attention to this?

Protesters are demonstrating in D.C.:

The procedural vote will come tomorrow morning. If McConnell thinks he has enough support, he’ll call for a vote on the Senate floor as early as Saturday.

As it stands now, the two Republican swing votes that anyone with a conscience Democrats were holding out for don’t seem likely to materialize. Sen. Jeff Flake, who some prematurely lauded as a hero, is reneging on last week’s last-minute spineless acquiescence. Sen. Susan Collins said the FBI report appeared very thorough, so we can count her as a lost cause.

A small glimmer of hope is that Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp, from very red North Dakota, has announced that she will be voting no on Kavanaugh. New polls show Heitkamp trailing her Republican challenger by 13 points, and there was some concern she’d vote for Kavanaugh to help close the gap.

There will be protests in Seattle today at 5 p.m. at Westlake Center. That’s pretty much all you can do from here besides contacting your representatives, finding a divine entity to pray to, or emigrating.

Nathalie Graham covers anything she finds fun, weird, or interesting. You can find a lot of that in her column, Play Date. Her work has also appeared around town in The Seattle Times, GeekWire, and the...