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Kavanaugh Proceedings Drive a Senate Once Governed by Decorum Into Rancor

Senators Charles E. Grassley and Dianne Feinstein talking with aides last week during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has exposed just how far the Senate has drifted from the rules of decorum that once elevated senatorial prerogative over party, leaving behind the kind of smash-mouth partisan politics that have long dominated the unruly House.

Senate rules dating back to Thomas Jefferson mandate that lawmakers refer to each other by state and title — “my good friend, the senator from California” — and forbid members from questioning motives, maligning a home state or imputing “to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” Senators are not even supposed to read a newspaper while another member of the body is speaking on the chamber floor.

Few of such niceties have been in evidence as the Senate struggles to fill the Supreme Court seat of the retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Republicans have accused Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of plotting a last-minute smear of Judge Kavanaugh, and have privately argued that the party’s senators demeaned themselves and the body by asking a nominee to the Supreme Court intimate questions about his drinking habits and sexual behavior.

With only circumstantial evidence, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, called for an investigation into whether Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, sat on and then leaked Christine Blasey Ford’s letter accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has delivered an escalating series of threats to his Democratic counterparts.

Even the nominee himself threatened Democratic senators, warning, “What goes around comes around.”

Democrats charged that Republicans are trying to cover up and “plow right through” with the confirmation of a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault simply in service to power politics. And they were unforgiving in their own assessments, accusing Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, of a “railroad job” to get Judge Kavanaugh through.

Mr. Grassley seemed to see it coming as he embarked on trying to confirm a stalwart conservative justice to the seat vacated by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s moderate swing vote.

“To the public, it looks like Republicans and Democrats never speak to each other, we don’t ever work together,” Mr. Grassley recalled saying at the outset of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “And for this nomination, I can understand why they would come to that conclusion.”

Judge Kavanaugh helped breach the Senate’s own protocols with his lashing performance last week. When two Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, questioned his drinking habits, he tried to turn the tables. “I’m curious if you have” ever been blackout drunk, he said to Ms. Klobuchar. To Mr. Whitehouse, he quipped, “Do you like beer, senator, or not? What do you like to drink?”

Far from coming to their colleagues’ defense, Republicans pressed on without a mention. They said Judge Kavanaugh’s emotional outbursts were justified given the circumstances, and on Tuesday, Mr. Graham said on Fox News that Ms. Klobuchar should apologize to the nominee “for being part of a smear campaign like I have never seen in 20 years in politics.”

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, alongside Senator Amy Klobuchar, held a copy of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s high school calendar during the hearing last week.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

Mr. Cotton joined in, deriding Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, for lying about his service in Vietnam: “Maybe he should reconsider before questioning Judge Kavanaugh’s credibility.”

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“You want this seat. I hope you never get it,” Senator Lindsey Graham said to Democrats last week.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

It was not supposed to be this way, and the rules were supposed to prohibit it.

“Jefferson’s argument was that politics were always going to be contentious, emotional, divisive, so to have any cool, reflective debate under those circumstances, you had to have rules to operate under some sort of decorum,” said Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate’s historian emeritus.

There have been obvious and famous exceptions that make present circumstances appear civil. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, was caned in the chamber by a pro-slavery House member from South Carolina.

In 1954, senators voted to condemn one of their own, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, for contempt for flouting the body’s norms. Notably, their measure sidestepped McCarthy’s divisive tactics in smearing supposed communists coming before his committee, the crux of the issue, in favor of his offenses against the Senate itself.

There was discussion of a rules breach as recently as 2015, when Senator Ted Cruz, the hard-charging Texas Republican, accused Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, of telling “a flat-out lie” on the Senate floor amid a debate about the Export-Import Bank. In a sign of the times, Mr. Cruz went on conservative talk radio afterward rather than apologizing for the breach.

But by and large, Jefferson’s rules have served their purpose, Mr. Ritchie said. Even during the most heated debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most divisive legislative periods in the modern Senate, senators drew a distinction between political differences and ad hominem attacks, said John Stewart, who served as Senator Hubert Humphrey’s top legislative aide during the debate over that legislation and other hallmark bills of the period.

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Senator Hubert Humphrey, third from left, watched President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Civil Rights Bill in 1964. Humphrey sparred with a pro-segregation Democrat during Civil Rights Act debates.Credit...Associated Press

Mr. Stewart recounted a fiery debate between Mr. Humphrey, who was tasked with advancing the Civil Rights Act, and Senator Absalom Willis Robertson, a pro-segregation Democrat from Virginia. When it was over, he said, Mr. Robertson crossed the Senate floor to stick his confederate battle flag pin on Mr. Humphrey’s lapel — a compliment for a debate well conducted. The two men walked off the floor arm in arm to drink bourbon in Mr. Robertson’s hideaway office.

“It was a club,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview. “You hate to sound like you are just living in the past, but damn it, it was different. It was much more civilized and much more respectful.”

Senator Jeff Flake, a retiring Arizona Republican, has said he had something similar in mind last Friday when he walked across the Judiciary Committee dais to hatch a deal with a friend, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. After a furious hour of negotiations that came to involve nearly every member of the committee, the two men agreed to start a one-week F.B.I. investigation into the accusations against Judge Kavanaugh and put off a final Senate vote on his confirmation.

“It’s always been the body where the rules of the Senate bring you together,” Mr. Flake said Tuesday during an event at the Atlantic Festival. “The Senate requires and pushes you together. But lately there have been so many things that have simply drug us apart. I don’t know how we get back, the incentives are all the other way.”

Mr. Flake’s agreement eased tensions in the short term, but it is unlikely to provide any sort of permanent salve. Small as it was, drafted by two relatively junior senators, the breakthrough served mostly to highlight how far normal relations between the two sides had slid, particularly around openings on the Supreme Court.

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Senator Jeff Flake was approached by Ms. Feinstein and Senator Patrick J. Leahy before taking a vote to move Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

With his departure, and the impending retirements of many of the Senate’s senior-most members in the coming years, it is just as likely that younger lawmakers less interested in compromise — like Mr. Cotton, Mr. Cruz and their liberal counterparts — become the norm.

Mr. Coons said he had already heard from Republicans who said they were simply no longer willing to work with certain Democrats.

“You can always challenge each other’s policies or priorities,” he said in an interview. “But to go after each other’s motives, and so aggressively and repeatedly, that makes it really hard to then sit down and work something out with someone who has just laid you out.”

The differences have been on display throughout Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Ms. Feinstein, at 85 a patrician Democrat who prizes productive relationships with Republicans, has been outflanked by younger members.

Mr. Grassley, also 85, frequently argues that acrimony sells; reporters rarely air stories about bipartisan legislation. But asked if he would investigate Ms. Feinstein and her staff, Mr. Grassley demurred.

“You ask a legitimate question, but I’m trying to maintain the best relationship I can with Dianne Feinstein,” he said. “I consider her a friend.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Kavanaugh Hearing Shows Drift From Decorum. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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