The Kavanaugh fight was historically ugly. Blame a Congress that was primed to bungle it.

Republicans got their guy on the Supreme Court. But no one in Washington is satisfied with the way Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation process played out.

That’s because Congress was forced to deal with something it was extremely ill-equipped to deal with — a sexual assault allegation that ran into one party’s desire to control the court for perhaps a generation.

Everything went wrong from the start. A constituent with a serious concern about Kavanaugh who wanted to remain anonymous could never have hoped to remain anonymous for long in that environment. Rumors of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh tried to rape her in high school circulated among Senate Democrats, but they could not prevent Kavanaugh’s nomination from moving out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A week before the committee’s vote on advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) appeared to have her hand forced by Democratic colleagues who wanted her to do something with the letter. She made a cryptic public statement that she had handed something over to the FBI regarding Kavanaugh’s past, essentially confirming the existence of the allegation.

From there, the chase was on to find out who made it. By that Sunday, Ford decided to go public as reporters invaded her classroom and her home.

Feinstein denies her staff leaked Ford’s name. But the leak did thrust the potentially career-ending allegations against Kavanaugh into the public sphere at the last minute. Her fellow Democrats have said that Feinstein was in an impossible situation, and they’re right. There is no rule book in Congress for how to handle an explosive letter like that from a constituent. Where is the nexus between respect for a sexual assault victim, civic duty and politics? It arguably doesn’t exist.

After Ford said she wanted to testify, it was Republicans' turn to fail to grasp the sensitivity of the situation. Republican leaders said they were moving forward with Kavanaugh’s confirmation no matter what Ford said. Actually, it wasn’t even clear they were going to hear her out in the first place. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a swing vote, said he pressured fellow Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing for Ford.

If the aim was to get to the truth, the hearing was a disaster. Republican senators wouldn’t even question Ford, hiring a prosecutor who had to question her in five-minute increments, punctuated by Democrats asking their own, partisan-tinted questions. “Was this a trial?” I wrote at the time. “A committee hearing? A spectacle? It felt like all three rolled into one.”

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