I was thinking the other day about why wouldn't the Republicans just cut bait on Kavanaugh when they have a literal list of other very conservative judges with the standard legal and ideological qualifications (albeit without Kavanaugh's uniquely deferential view of executive power). You want to look like you care about women? Cut Kavanaugh loose and nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett. She's a reliable vote and the evangelicals will be ecstatic. Done.
But then I thought about what kept coming up again and again in the Republican senators' comments, particularly in Lindsey Graham's meltdown during the testimony. Timing. They are furious that these allegations did not come out earlier and that the Democrats "held" them.
And I think the reason that matters is that it is now too late to even get through the document production portion of the confirmation progress, even for someone like Barrett with a relatively short document trail. This suggests that had this info come out earlier, they very well might have pulled Kavanaugh, but now they feel like they can't because if the Dems take the Senate, the Republicans believe they'll Garland (and, yes, that should be a verb like "Bork") their nominees for the next two years.
It's interesting because most publically available polling suggests that taking a majority of the Senate is a real long shot for Democrats. Fivethirtyeight has been giving a steady 30% chance of Democrats taking the Senate for at least a month. If they really believed those were the odds, I would think they'd take the risk. The fact that they won't, and that they appear so genuinely incensed about how this played out, suggests to me that their internal polling has them spooked.
For whatever it's worth, I sincerely hope no one ever does to another nominee what Mitch McConnell did to Garland. It's a terrible, unconstitutional precedent, and I hope it's a one-off. Any Supreme Court nominee from any presidendent deserves a hearing and a vote. From a practical standpoint, I'm not even sure that it's possible to for Democrats to Garland a nominee because they have a number of moderate Senators and they're not as lock-step as Republicans. But I find the fact that Republicans are terrified that Democrats will use their own tactic against them very telling.