by Ady Barkan
Many moons ago, Liz and I talked about launching an early strike against Maine senator Susan Collins in advance of her 2020 reelection campaign. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has given us the perfect opening. So we stroll/roll five blocks, me in slight but tolerable discomfort, until we reach a gathering of fifty activists in the town square across the street from her offices. I give the closing remarks. Everybody gathers close, straining to make out my words, even though they are amplified.
“Susan Collins has heard from thousands of Mainers,” I say. “You have visited her offices, written letters, made phone calls, begged and pleaded with her to protect the rights of Americans to have abortions. But she seems unmoved. So we need to try a different approach. And I have an idea.”
I lay out the plan that Liz and I have hatched. We will launch a fund-raising campaign to support Collins’s eventual 2020 opponent, even though none has yet been selected. But there’s a catch. The money will be collected only if she votes in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. If she votes no, or forces the nomination to be withdrawn, the pledges will be voided. My audience likes the idea. I’m hopeful that we may raise a lot of money, perhaps even $100,000, to help motivate her to make the right choice.
We march over to her offices, which are closed on this sunny Saturday, and sing songs and drop off funeral flowers to foreshadow the death of reproductive choice in America. Then we return to the hotel, where my stepmom puts on a bathing suit and she and my father stand me up in the shower and wash the filth off my butt and legs. Rachael has a conference in Vancouver, so tomorrow they will transport me and Carl back to Santa Barbara. I can’t wait to be home.
A couple days after we got home, my beloved home health aide Laura delivered some difficult news. She no longer felt she could safely take care of me. My stability had declined over the summer months, and she worried that she could not prevent me from falling. Sooner or later I would need a larger, stronger home health aide, and Laura wanted to make the switch before I injured myself on her watch. With incredible speed and competence, she interviewed a handful of potential replacements and found one candidate whom she thought was head and shoulders above the rest. We invited him for an interview at my dining room table. Mario Diaz was a forty-eight-year-old hulk of a man, with broad shoulders, powerful hands, and a gentle demeanor. He’d been doing this work for a couple of decades and had experience caring for fully paralyzed people, so he would be able to manage the multitude of marginal adjustments that would be necessary every month as my body declined. I was sad to see Laura go but grateful that she had coordinated such a smooth transition. We promised to come visit her houseboat in the marina.
Mario’s morning care became a highlight of my days. It was so good to have him bring me coffee, scrub my face vigorously with a soapy washcloth and rub it dry with a second one, wash my hair in the sink, and prepare and feed me breakfast, which increasingly shifted to scrambled eggs rather than fried. His sponge baths replaced the shower for me and—since after thirty years of biting my nails, ALS forced me to stop—he kept my fingers neat as well.
I had planned to spend the fall resting, completing my memoir, and using my modest social media platform to encourage progressives to #BeAHero and volunteer as much as possible in the final weeks before the midterm elections. But Washington, D.C., had other ideas. The Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled its hearings to consider the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court for the first week in September. His confirmation would represent a grave threat to the American people: whereas outgoing Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believed that the Constitution guaranteed the right to contraception, abortion, and gay marriage, Kavanaugh believed that Congress and the states could outlaw these things. And, at only fifty-three, he would likely cement a radical right-wing majority for thirty years or more. This was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, because a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 election would have delivered the Supreme Court to progressives for the first time in fifty years. We had come so close, and now the future looked so dim.
Unwilling to quietly accept such a monumental loss, my comrades sprang into action. Liz Jaff enlisted a bunch of celebrities to promote our anti–Susan Collins fund-raiser and she even found a major donor who agreed to pay for digital ads promoting the fund. (Collins claimed to support abortion rights, and if we could persuade her to vote no, we could defeat Kavanaugh with only one more Republican. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was our best hope.) Jen Flynn did her thing, bringing a squadron of bird-doggers into the Senate to disrupt the hearings. News coverage of the first day was filled with images of Jennifer Epps-Addison, Linda Sarsour, and others wearing Be a Hero T-shirts and demanding that Kavanaugh be rejected. The ferocity of their opposition changed the whole tenor of the Kavanaugh debate, which had previously been rather milquetoast, creating new space for Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to grill the nominee on his dishonesty and radical ideology. The well-branded protests paired perfectly with our anti-Collins fund-raiser, which started performing spectacularly, blowing past my expectations and raising over a million dollars in about a week. We had certainly gotten her attention. But I was discouraged by her response. Rather than acknowledging the deeply held feelings on both sides of the debate and promising to do what was best for her constituents—which would have left her room to vote yes or no in a couple of weeks—Collins began showing her true colors, describing our crowdfunding campaign as bribery. The radical right was clearly concerned that our effort would sway her: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Senator Ted Cruz made nearly identical statements. It seemed as though our tactical prowess would be insufficient and we were going to fall one or two votes short.
And then something happened. Christine Blasey Ford, a high school acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s, published an op-ed alleging that he had tried to rape her at a summer-evening party when they were in school. She had told her husband and therapist about the attack years earlier, lending credence to her allegation. Washington was thrown into a tizzy. After some initial jockeying, the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled an additional day of hearings on September 27 to hear directly from Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh, who immediately denied any wrongdoing.
We mobilized our troops again, and this time a much broader swath of the progressive movement got in on the action. There were now three powerful new reasons to fight hard. First, it had become clear that Kavanaugh was an odious human being. It would be a disgrace to see him with lifetime tenure on the nation’s highest court. Second, confirming Kavanaugh in the face of Ford’s damning allegation would send a terrible message to millions of victims of sexual violence: there is no point in coming forward because the people in power won’t believe you (or won’t care that you’ve been assaulted) and your credibility, privacy, and safety may all come under attack. That is to say, confirming Kavanaugh would undermine all the good work that the #MeToo movement had done over the past year to encourage victims to speak up and institutions to punish perpetrators. Third, there might now even be a plausible path to saving the Supreme Court seat. If the White House were forced to withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination, there would be no time to confirm a different nominee before the midterm elections. If Democrats then managed to capture the majority, all bets would be off. Indeed it was precisely this nightmare scenario that drove Republicans to double and triple down on Kavanaugh’s candidacy, despite the powerful evidence that he was unfit to serve.
Nate, Aiyana, and I got on a plane to Baltimore on Sunday the twenty-third and checked into a suburban Holiday Inn. The Capitol Skyline Hotel had no availability. Early the next morning we went downstairs for breakfast and met up with Binyamin Appelbaum, the New York Times reporter who had covered my work on Fed Up and was now writing a profile of me. We talked shop and then drove into the city. We rolled into the bright atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, which was beginning its transformation into a massive progressive movement reunion hall. Tracey and Julia and the rest of the summer crew
were there, handing out black Be a Hero T-shirts to everyone in sight. Leaders from the Women’s March were handing out signs saying “Believe Women” and “Cancel Kavanaugh” and pins saying “I Believe Christine” and “I Still Believe Anita Hill.” There were boxes of coffee, trays of bagels and cream cheese, sign-up sheets, press releases, hugs, and selfies. I was swarmed by old friends, new well-wishers, and a few supporters and videographers. Aiyana put my amplifier on, but in the din and with my increasingly enfeebled tongue, there was almost no way that anybody could understand me. Aiyana stood by my side, translating. I smiled more than I spoke and tried to use my words efficiently. I had learned how to do my work without functional legs or hands, but I wasn’t yet sure how to lead a protest movement without my voice.
Our field marshal commanded us up to Susan Collins’s office, where hundreds of protesters, dozens of police, and a handful of TV cameras filled the hallway. Survivors of sexual violence began to tell their painful stories, begging Collins’s staff members to see their humanity and convince their boss to vote no. Eventually, Jen Flynn gave the signal: “If the senator isn’t willing to meet with us, then I think we’re gonna have to shut this office down.” She said it calmly and confidently and then walked away, like a mafioso ordering a hit. Her wish was our command, and dozens of women (and a handful of men) sat down on the floor and bellowed out my chant with more passion than ever before: “Kavanaugh’s disgusting, and that’s why we’re disrupting!”
Next stop was the office of Nebraska senator Ben Sasse. He got his PhD in American history from Yale, the same august institution that bestowed a juris doctorate on Brett Kavanaugh (and me). The week before, while preparing for the trip, I had called up Yale Law School professor Amy Kapczynski, who had mentored me in the access-to-medicine movement a decade before and had been by my side in December when I first got arrested protesting the tax bill. “What are y’all doing to help stop Kavanaugh?” I had asked her. She didn’t have a good reply on hand, but it only took her a few days to answer with gusto: she organized a large majority of the Yale Law School faculty to sign a letter calling for a thorough FBI investigation into Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation, and she enlisted the best student organizers in the struggle as well. They filled buses with one hundred students—one-sixth of the whole student body!—to come join our protest, which led to the cancellation of classes for the day. Now these Yalies, all wearing our school’s apparel, filed into Sasse’s office, telling stories, demanding justice.
Jeff Flake’s office was our final one for the afternoon. I stationed my chair right beneath the name plaque outside his door. Ana Maria stood next to me. We listened as an old activist recounted her rape decades earlier. She had never spoken publicly about it before. Christine Blasey Ford had given her the courage and the conviction to come down to D.C. and join this epic battle for our nation’s soul, she said. We were veterans of this work. We had heard many wrenching stories in our time. But that one overwhelmed all of us.
Suddenly, Ana Maria spoke up. She, too, had been assaulted. As a young girl. And nobody believed her. Although Ana and I had been close friends and colleagues for eight years, this was news to me. And it was also, she told me shortly afterward, news to her parents. This was not the way she wanted them to find out, but duty called. Office after office, hallway after hallway, interview upon interview upon Facebook post and Twitter thread, at dining room tables and break room water coolers, in cities and suburbs and small towns all around America, survivors of sexual violence were drawing inspiration and courage from Christine Blasey Ford and one another, telling a national story in millions of tragic acts.
We ended the day, like we had ended so many previous days of resistance, in the Russell Senate Office Building rotunda. Two dozen men gathered around me and Shawn Sebastian. We handed out copies of an open letter that I had authored and circulated, pledging solidarity and support for the women who were leading this movement. Shawn read it aloud as cameras flashed and streamed. I nodded my head rhythmically to the chants and songs but did not even try to add my voice. The police took everyone away one by one until I was the last protester in the middle of the vast marble floor. I looked up to the curved roof of the rotunda and saw the late-afternoon light streaming in through the windows. We do what we can while we can. That was the motto that my father and I settled upon in the months after my diagnosis with ALS. And right then, that was what I could do: put my body there, in a shared struggle for shared liberation.
Tomorrow I would rest. There was still much work to be done.
On Wednesday we were at it again, focused this time exclusively on the offices of female Republican senators. At each stop, women poured their hearts out, and dozens more were brought to tears. Jennifer Epps-Addison told her story. Aiyana Sage told hers. Alyssa Milano told hers. You could taste the righteous indignation, smell the despair, hear all around you the powerful sounds of sisterhood. Could these senators really vote to confirm this man after seeing the outpouring of opposition from millions of women? It was too horrific to fathom.
At the end of the day, after Aiyana had been arrested, Liz, Nate and I went to a press conference organized by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. We were still hoping that she would raise some money to help us run election ads in this final month. We waited on the side while Pelosi and a couple dozen members of Congress recounted for the bank of cameras the struggle in 1991 to defeat Clarence Thomas’s nomination under depressingly similar circumstances. Before Pelosi wrapped up the event, she said that there was a special guest in the room and turned to me. Would I like to share a few words? For the first time in my life, I was afraid of public speaking. I didn’t know if I could be heard. If I could be understood. I began to utter something from my spot, but a TV producer insisted that I go up to the podium, where one microphone fed to all the networks. I rolled up, two dozen members of Congress behind me, but the mechanics were all wrong. Liz pulled on the microphone but it wouldn’t budge. It was too short, and the podium wouldn’t let me get close enough to it. I lined up sideways, leaning over my right shoulder to get my mouth as close as possible.
Demosthenes practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth. But the vibrating tongue in mine was obstacle enough. For three minutes I pushed out each word with the maximum force and clarity that I could muster, trying to capture the monumental stakes of this fight, looking forward to the election and to new days in our future when the American government would promote the dignity of the American people. When I was done, the members of Congress surrounded me and offered their affections. Barbara Lee embarrassed me by kissing my limp left hand. I told Maxine Waters how honored I was to be in this fight with her—a woman who remains unbought and unbossed all these years later. She laughed with glee, because that was the catchphrase of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress. Liz and Nate came up afterward, patting me on the back and teasing me for having said that my voice was done for.
None of us yet knew, but it was the last speech I would ever deliver.
Both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh were scheduled to testify that Thursday. When we arrived, there were well over a thousand activists milling about the Hart Senate Office Building. The atmosphere was one part carnival, one part protest, one part progressive movement reunion, and one part wake. We still didn’t know where we would find the votes to defeat this odious nominee. Sitting in my wheelchair in the lobby, elevated to adult eye level, I was mobbed by old comrades and new well-wishers. I tried to carve out ten minutes to catch up with my old boss Amy Carroll, whom I hadn’t seen since April. My headset and amplifier made me somewhat intelligible, so we had to supplement with translation from Aiyana.
“You’re a star,” Amy needled me as we were interrupted for the umpteenth time. “Just like you always wanted.” I decided not to point out the rather significant ways in which this existence diverged from what I had always wanted.
We had decided not to engage in any civil disobedience that day, in order
to keep the focus on the two witnesses’ testimony. As the ten a.m. hearing start time approached, we all split up and went to find senators’ offices from which to watch. My friends and I thought it would be fun to go occupy Ted Cruz’s waiting room, and so, with a Politico reporter in tow (he was writing a story about me), Ben Wikler and Helen and Tracey and Julia and Nate and Aiyana and I all plopped ourselves down in the office of the most disliked man on Capitol Hill. His office receptionists were surprised but cordial and, with Texas hospitality, turned the two televisions on just as Christine Blasey Ford began her testimony and offered us snacks and drinks.
Within a couple of hours it seemed to us that the Kavanaugh nomination was doomed. Blasey Ford came across as a reasonable, sympathetic, credible individual and her story was entirely believable. Indeed, she explained that she had tried to alert the White House to Kavanaugh’s crime even before he was nominated, precisely so that the president would pick someone else. The prosecutor whom the Republicans had deputized to ask their questions did nothing to undermine Ford’s credibility. What was the most vivid memory she had of the attack? one Democratic senator asked. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Blasey Ford replied, in a line that would itself become indelible. “The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”
By the time her testimony was over, in the early afternoon, the reviews were unanimous. Even Fox News agreed that Blasey Ford was a stellar witness and that Kavanaugh’s nomination was in trouble. We were in high spirits, so we decamped to watch Kavanaugh’s testimony from Kamala Harris’s office, eager to witness the former prosecutor make mincemeat out of the nominee. And then something unexpected happened.