Just after Thursday’s historic, dramatic, emotional and day-long U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his sexual abuse accuser Christine Blasey Ford, Virginia U.S. Senator Tim Kaine spoke to a large Democratic gathering across the river in Arlington, abandoning a campaign stump speech for an impassioned indictment of the Senate Republicans for refusing to budge in their support of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Will there not be one?,” Kaine intoned repeatedly concerning the GOP committee members’ seemingly unwavering commitment to confirm Kavanaugh despite Ford’s testimony and the accusations of three other women not invited to the hearing about Kavanaugh’s history of sexual assaults on women. (Today, after the committee approved the confirmation along party lines, it appeared that at least two Republicans will not support the confirmation in the general Senate vote prior to an FBI investigation).

Kaine assailed Kavanaugh for reverting to “what was, is and will be a completely partisan” testimony where he “blamed Democrats as if the Ford testimony meant nothing.”

“There is enough on the table that, at a minimum, there needs to be a full FBI investigation,” he said, speculating that there are only two reasons why the GOP won’t allow it. “Either they don’t care about assaults (noting that his GOP opponent Corey Stewart’s tweet equated two 17-year-old males barricading a 15-year-old girl in a room and attempting to rape her to “pulling pigtails in the first grade”–ed.) or they don’t want to find out what an investigation will reveal.”

This November’s midterm elections, he said, will not be about Republicans versus Democrats, but about “who we as a nation are, and who aren’t we,” noting that the 40 days remaining until the election represent an “existential reality.”