The much-anticipated and nationally televised Senate confirmation hearing for Donald Trump's latest Supreme Court nominee provided a golden opportunity for three Democrats touted as 2020 presidential prospects to make their mark.
All three made the most of it.
The confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh had scarcely begun when Senator Kamala Harris jumped in with a point of order.
The daughter of a cancer researcher from India and a Jamaican economics professor, Harris coolly interrupted the Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican chairman -- a man 31 years her senior -- to complain that thousands of pages of Kavanaugh's record had been provided to Democrats only hours before the hearing.
Her Democratic colleagues then quickly joined in, turning what normally might have been a sedate and relatively civil hearing into a running and at times fiery partisan skirmish.
And that was only the first of three days of high-voltage hearings that allowed Harris and ambitious fellow senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar to position themselves as fervent defenders of American -- and Democratic Party -- values.
Whether their outpouring of energy changed anything is less clear. The Senate's Republican majority is thought to offer a clear path for Kavanaugh's confirmation to the high court, where he is expected to provide a decisive conservative vote on explosive issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
"It is all about the 2020 Democrat presidential primary," John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, groused on Twitter. The three senators have yet to express official interest in running for the presidency. But their words and actions during the hearing were revealing.
There are only three African Americans in the 100-seat US Senate, but two of them -- Booker, 49, of New Jersey, and Harris, 53, of California -- managed to place themselves squarely in the spotlight during the Kavanaugh hearings.
As junior members of the Judiciary Committee, they had to wait hours before being able to question Kavanaugh on Wednesday. But they did not lack energy once they had their chance, even with night already falling over the Capitol building.
Pointed questioning by Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, produced some of Kavanaugh's few moments of hesitation or uncertainty.
"Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?" she asked in an effort to pry a moment of unfiltered candor from the ever-cautious nominee on the question of abortion. "I'm not aware -- I'm not -- thinking of any right now, senator," he finally said, stammering a bit.
In the same incisive tone, Harris grilled Kavanaugh about the investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller is leading into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
She repeatedly hinted that she possessed compromising information, though she never laid it out. Still, videos of the exchange quickly went viral on social media.
On Thursday, it was Booker's turn in the spotlight. In fiery remarks, he said he was ready to risk expulsion from the Senate for having revealed confidential documents about Kavanaugh's positions on racial profiling. Saying he embraced the tradition of "civil disobedience" made famous by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, Booker went so far as to compare himself to the rebel gladiator Spartacus, who led a slave uprising against the Roman republic.
But Republican Cornyn took him to task, suggesting that Booker's dramatic defiance was transparently political.
"Running for president is no excuse for violating the rules of the Senate or the confidentiality that we are privy to," he said.
In fact, the release of the documents had been authorized hours before Booker's remarks, and expulsion was not a serious threat. But like Harris, Booker, a former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, had secured his moment in front of the cameras -- and on social media.
In more conciliatory tones but with notable rigor, Klobuchar, 58, questioned Kavanaugh about laws governing election finance and discrimination -- subjects of profound interest to the Democratic base. Two other Democratic senators thought to have their eyes on 2020 -- 76-year-old Bernie Sanders, who lost in the 2016 primaries to Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren, 69 -- are not on the Judiciary Committee and so were unable to join in the questioning.
But, coincidence or not, Warren broke with her usual discretion to tell journalists during the week that she plans to speak with them more often. And even as the Kavanaugh hearings were wrapping up, she seized attention amid the recent debate about Trump's competence, urging his cabinet members to use a constitutional provision to force him aside if they determine he is genuinely unfit to govern.
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