The elation women felt after seeing Ford tell her story that prompted so many others to tell theirs is dissipating. The FBI investigation is grudging and all too limited, likely to lend the GOP more of a fig leaf than unearth facts that would buttress and jog Ford’s memory. Republicans plowed on through as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised, scheduling a vote even before the FBI sent its findings to Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jeff Flake’s crisis of conscience will end. If Kavanaugh’s writings against the settledness of Roe didn’t move Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), she will have done her bit for women by supporting reopening Kavanaugh’s background check and nothing more. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is in play.

The Beatles sang that we all say we want a revolution, that we want to change the world. But not so much in the face of white male privilege reasserting itself, the automatic assumption that a powerful man is to be believed over any woman.