The Senate held a cloture vote Friday to send Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to a vote Saturday. What is a cloture vote and why is it important?A cloture vote ends debate on the subject in question - a nominee, a bill - anything on which the Senate might vote for. A cloture vote essentially says there is enough information to make a decision. Discussion may continue after a cloture vote, but an affirmative cloture vote is a greenlight to set the final vote.According to ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts, a senator's "aye" vote in cloture does not necessarily indicate support for the subject in question, but signals enough information gathered to make a decision. A no vote is typically a sure sign the senator will not vote for the subject in question, Roberts said.On Wednesday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed cloture that puts a time limit on debate and pushes the Senate toward a confirmation vote.Senate Republicans need a majority yes vote to confirm Kavanaugh after the FBI investigated several accusations of sexual assault and drunken behavior.A simple majority of the upper chamber voted Friday to move forward with a vote on whether to confirm Kavanaugh to the high court; 51 senators voted yes and 49 no.At least one senator -- Republican Susan Collins of Maine -- says her cloture vote to end the debate does not mean she will vote yes on Kavanaugh's nomination. She is expected to announce her decision Friday afternoon.If all Senate Democrats vote against Kavanaugh, the GOP can only afford to lose one Republican vote.One Republican -- Montana Senator Steve Daines -- won't be there. He's walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding Saturday.That leaves Republicans Collins, Jeff Flake, and Lisa Murkowski, and Democrat Joe Manchin as swing votes. </s> Judge Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in before testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27. The procedural vote on the Kavanaugh nomination is scheduled for Friday at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

The U.S. Senate will move forward with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be elevated to the Supreme Court. A procedural vote, called a "cloture" vote, on the Kavanaugh nomination is scheduled for Friday at 10:30 a.m. EDT. If it passes, it could pave the way for a final vote as early as Saturday.

It's an important vote because it effectively blocks any filibuster attempt by Democrats to delay a vote on Kavanaugh and officially gives the Senate 30 hours to debate the nomination.

The 30 hours gets divided equally between Republicans and Democrats. The debate could take less than the 30-hour maximum if either party decides not to use all of its allotted time. Senators will take to the Senate floor to give speeches and make a last effort to sway votes.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who is a reliable vote for Kavanaugh, will be walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding on Saturday and will not be available to vote. That could lead Republican leaders to delay the final vote on Kavanugh until Sunday or next week.

USA Today will be providing live coverage in the player above of the Senate floor for the votes and debate on the Kavanaugh nomination. </s> WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Senate pushed Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination past a key procedural hurdle Friday, setting up a likely final showdown this weekend in a battle that's seen claims of long-ago sexual assault by the nominee threaten President Donald Trump's effort to tip the court rightward for decades.

The Senate voted 51-49 to limit debate, effectively defeating Democratic efforts to scuttle the nomination with endless delays. With Republicans clinging to a two-vote majority, one Republican voted to stop the nomination, one Democrat to send it further.

Of the four lawmakers who had not revealed their decisions until Friday, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Jeff Flake of Arizona voted yes, as did Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted not to send the nomination to the full Senate.

After the vote Flake told reporters he is currently planning to vote yes when the final vote occurs.

Lawmakers might vote differently on the climactic confirmation roll call, and Collins told reporters that she wouldn't rule out doing so. The Maine Senator added that she would announce her decision by 3 p.m. Friday.

That left unclear whether Friday's tally signaled that the 53-year-old federal appellate judge was on his way to the nation's highest court. Confirmation would be a crowning achievement for Trump, his conservative base and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Trump tweeted shortly after Friday's vote, saying he was "very proud of the U.S. Senate for voting 'YES' to advance the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh!"

The vote occurred a day after the Senate received a roughly 50-page FBI report on the sexual assault allegations, which Trump ordered only after wavering GOP senators forced him to do so.

Republicans said the secret document — which described interviews agents conducted with 10 witnesses — failed to find anyone who could corroborate allegations by his two chief accusers, Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez. Democrats belittled the bureau's findings, saying agents constrained by the White House hadn't reached out to numerous other people with potentially important information.

The vote also occurred against a backdrop of smoldering resentment by partisans on both sides. That fury was reflected openly by thousands of boisterous anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators who bounced around the Capitol complex for days, confronting senators in office buildings and even reportedly near their homes.

On the Senate floor, lawmakers' comments underscored the lingering bitterness.

"What left wing groups and their Democratic allies have done to Judge Kavanaugh is nothing short of monstrous," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said on the chamber's floor before the vote. He accused Democrats of using destructive, unwarranted personal attacks on the nominee and even encouraging the protesters, saying, "They have encouraged mob rule."

Dianne Feinstein of California, that committee's top Democrat, said Kavanaugh's testimony at last week's dramatic Judiciary panel hearing should "worry us all," citing "a hostility and belligerence that is unbecoming" of a Supreme Court nominee.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the fight "a sorry epilogue to the brazen theft of Justice Scalia's seat." That reflected Democrats' lasting umbrage over Republicans' 2016 refusal to even consider Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

When Trump nominated Kavanaugh in July, Democrats leapt to oppose him, saying that past statements and opinions showed he'd be a threat to the Roe v. Wade case that assured the right to abortion. They said he also seemed ready to knock down President Barack Obama's health care law and to rule for Trump if federal authorities probing his 2016 campaign's connections to Russia initiate legal action.

But that evolved into a late-summer spectacle after Ford accused Kavanaugh of trying to rape her at an alcohol-infused high school gathering in 1982, when both were teenagers. Two other women also emerged and accused him of other incidents of sexual misconduct. Kavanaugh has denied all the charges.

Under pressure from wavering Republicans, GOP leaders agreed to an extraordinary Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week that mesmerized the nation as Ford nervously recounted her story and said she was "100 percent" certain that Kavanaugh was her attacker.

A fuming Kavanaugh strode into the same packed hearing room that afternoon and said he, too, was "100 percent" certain the incident had not occurred. He angrily accused Democrats of a "search and destroy" mission, fueled by their hatred of Trump.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> The Senate vote on confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is certain to be close, even if the outcome is no longer suspenseful. Enough senators have indicated they will support him Saturday to put him over the edge, with a likely margin of two votes. That's barring a last-minute change of mind. </s> The Senate is poised to take a crucial vote Friday on whether to advance Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court as key Republican senators remain undecided amid allegations of sexual misconduct and intense protests that have divided the nation.

The 53-year-old judge made what were in effect closing arguments by acknowledging that he became "very emotional" when forcefully denying the allegations at a Judiciary Committee hearing last week. "I said a few things I should not have said," he wrote in an op-ed published Thursday evening. But he said he remains the same "hardworking, even-keeled" person he has always been. "Going forward, you can count on me," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

The op-ed, as well as a late boost from President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Minnesota, appeared aimed at winning over the three wavering senators from the slim GOP majority — Susan Collins of Maine, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — and one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has yet to announce his position.

Ahead of Friday's voting, Republicans emerged confident that an FBI investigation into the allegations unearthed no new corroborating details, they said. But a level of uncertainty lingered as Collins and Flake spent hours Thursday pouring over confidential FBI documents in the secure basement briefing room long after others had left seemingly satisfied with the findings.

Even without locking in support, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed ahead with trying to move Trump's nominee forward in what would be an election year win for his party. The Republican leader has little room for error with his party's slim 51-49 hold on the Senate, even if Vice President Mike Pence is called in to break a tie. A final vote is expected Saturday.

Tensions have been high at the Capitol with opponents of Kavanaugh, including survivors of sexual assault, confronting senators in the halls and holding vigil across the street at the Supreme Court. Supporters of Kavanaugh also turned out.

Trump said the protesters' "rage-fueled resistance is starting to backfire at a level nobody has ever seen before." He was referring to polling that shows some improvement for Republicans heading into the midterm election.

Friday's vote is a procedural one to end the debate, and some fence-sitting senators could conceivably vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination but still hold out their support ahead of a final confirmation roll call over the weekend.

Two of the undeclared Republicans emerged from the secure briefing facility Thursday accepting the FBI report as "thorough," bolstering GOP hopes for confirmation.

Flake told reporters that "we've seen no additional corroborating information" about the claims against Kavanaugh.

Collins also expressed satisfaction, calling it "a very thorough investigation." She paid two visits to the off-limits room where the document was being displayed to lawmakers.

Murkowski said she was "still reviewing" her decision.

Democrats complained that the investigation, running just six days after Trump reluctantly ordered it, was shoddy, omitting interviews with numerous potential witnesses. They accused the White House of limiting the FBI's leeway.

Those not interviewed in the reopened background investigation included Kavanaugh himself and Christine Blasey Ford, who ignited the furor by alleging he'd molested her in a locked room at a 1982 high school gathering.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, said while her party had agreed to a weeklong FBI probe with a finite scope, "We did not agree that the White House should tie the FBI's hands."

A hefty police presence added an air of anxiety, as did thousands of anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators. U.S. Capitol Police said 302 were arrested — among them comedian Amy Schumer, a distant relative of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement late Thursday that said the FBI reached out to 11 people and interviewed 10. Six of the witnesses involved Ford's claims, including an attorney for one of them, and four were related to Deborah Ramirez, who has asserted that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when both were Yale freshmen. Grassley said the FBI concluded "there is no collaboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez."

Senators said the documents they examined totaled about 50 pages.

The underlying material from the FBI included text and Facebook messages, said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., including screenshots that "were very helpful" in understanding the communications between various people discussing the situation.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said nine of the pages were about Mark Judge, the Kavanaugh friend who Ford said also jumped on her while Kavanaugh assaulted her. Judge has said he doesn't recall the incident.

White House spokesman Raj Shah rebuffed Democrats' complaints, saying, "What critics want is a never-ending fishing expedition into high school drinking."

Barring leaks, it was unclear how much if anyhttps://tegna.lakana.com/ of the FBI report would be made public.

AP reporters Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking, Padmananda Rama, Juliet Linderman, Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo, Catherine Lucey and Zeke Miller in Washington and John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> The country remains deeply divided on the question of whether Brett Kavanaugh should – or should not – be confirmed as the nation’s next Supreme Court justice. But now that the FBI has concluded its latest background check on Kavanaugh and the Senate is again poised to vote on his confirmation, the online betting odds that Kavanaugh will secure the 51 or more votes he needs take a seat on the High Court appear to be trending in the Judge’s favor.

Consider the online political market PredictIT, which has been accepting “trades” on the odds of Kavanaugh getting a set number of “Yea” votes during the confirmation process. In the one week since Kavanaugh, and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the price to buy a “Yes” trade on Kavanaugh getting 49 votes or fewer (by October 31,) has fallen from 45 cents to 20 cents. The price to buy “No,” meanwhile, has risen from 57 cents to 84 cents.

PredictIT chart shows odds improving on likelihood that Judge Brett Kavanaugh will receive the votes to get confirmed for the Supreme Court by the U.S. Senate.

Meanwhile, you’d get 16 cents to sell a “Yes” share you already owned; a week ago, you’d get 43 cents upon selling that share. Similarly, you’d get 80 cents now to sell that “No” share; a week ago, you’d get 55 cents.

More: You can bet online on the likelihood Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed

More: Even when Supreme Court isn't at stake, bad acts in high school can haunt decades later

More: The Kavanaugh hearings triggering painful memories? How to mute sexual assault on Twitter

The latest price overall on the likelihood of 49 "Yes" votes has declined from 43 cents to 15 cents. In fact, the price on 49 "Yes" votes dropped 13 cents from just the day before.

If the prediction comes true, PredictIt will redeem all Yes shares at $1. Shares in No will have zero value. Conversely, if this prediction does not come true, PredictIt will redeem all No shares at $1, and shares in Yes will have zero value.

The most likely outcome, at least according to PredictIT, is that Kavanaugh will secure 53 "Yes" votes, currently valued at 40 cents, or up 7 cents from the day before. The price on 52 "Yes" votes is now at 22 cents or up a nickel. And the price on 51 votes is at 13 cents, down 4 cents.

Of course, you can also bet on Kavanaugh getting 60 votes or more, a share of which is currently valued at just a penny.

PredictIt was born out of a project at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. The site allows you to make predictions about various political events or elections – besides Kavanaugh, the odds of whether the Democrats or Republicans will control the House or Senate, for example – by buying shares in the outcome, either Yes or No. Each outcome has a real-time probability between 1 and 99 percent, converted into U.S. cents.

The latest price is determined by the most recent trade made between two players. As PredictIt explains, very often, players will want to buy or sell shares at a price slightly better for them, usually a cent or two, than the most recent trade.

Incidentally, if it turns out that no vote is taken on Kavanaugh’s nomination – should President Donald Trump, as is almost certainly not going to happen, withdraws his nomination at the last minute – that will be considered a “Yes” outcome for people who bet on 49 votes or less.

Of course, given all the drama surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination, anything is still possible.

As Will Jennings, the head of public engagement at PredictIT put it a week ago: “Given the nature of this event, and the amount of new information that has come to light throughout the confirmation process, forecasting the outcome has been a moving target. There are few comparisons for considering the odds on something like this. This is not like forecasting an election where you have a lot of historical data to base your projections on.”

A separate online betting site, BetDSI, also suggests Kavanaugh will ultimately get the blessing of the Senate. BetDSI puts the odds he gets confirmed at "-500," compared to "+300" that he is denied the necessary votes. (By way of explanation, "-500" indicates a bettor must risk $500 to win $100; "+350" indicates a bettor must risk $100 to win $350, and thus is considered the "underdog.") </s> WASHINGTON — Republican leaders scheduled a Friday vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, following a day-long hearing in which senators heard testimony from a woman who alleges he sexually assaulted her when they were teens.

However, it was unclear whether Republicans had the votes to confirm the nominee after an emotional hearing where Christine Blasey Ford detailed her allegations that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and tried to remove her clothes at a party when they were both teens.

Ford told the Senate Judiciary Commitee she was "100 percent" confident Kavanaugh was the person who held her down and tried to remove her clothes at a party when they were both teens in 1982. Kavanaugh vehemently denied the allegations.

Friday's vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled for 9:30 a.m.

Confirmation by Kavanaugh would be an important milestone for Republicans and the president as it would tilt the balance of power on the high court to conservatives.

But Democrats have pointed to the array of accusations and lack of an FBI investigation as a reason to slow down the hearing, potentially allowing more accusations to surface.

President Donald Trump voiced his support for a Friday vote on Twitter, saying Kavanaugh's testimony was "powerful, honest, and riveting."

"Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him," the president said. "Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!"

In testimony that was both fiery and at times tearful, Kavanaugh said the sexual assault allegations had harmed his family and his name. He professed his innocence and accused Democrats of "character assassination." Kavanaugh also pledged to fight for this nomination, saying: "you'll never get me to quit." </s> "A team player on the Team of Nine."

Given the drama and anguish of the last months in the Church and the country, the average American and certainly the average Catholic might be forgiven for having possibly forgotten about the impending confirmation hearings for the 53-year old Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. After all, there are the upcoming mid-term elections, the on-going investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and, of course, the catastrophic scandal surrounding Theodore McCarrick, the horrifying Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, and the letter of Archbishop Carlo Viganò accusing Pope Francis of complicity in covering up McCarrick’s sexual misconduct and abuse of power.

Any thoughts, however, of overlooking the hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh were swiftly disabused by the theatrics, shouting, histrionics and apocalyptic tone all within the very first hour of the confirmation hearing that began on Tuesday morning. More than seventy angry and shouting protesters were arrested and removed from the committee room, and all of the Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee made repeated efforts to postpone the hearing by lodging unsuccessful procedural motions and interrupting their Republican colleagues.

While the anger and raucous atmospherics eased in the hours that followed, the tone and direction of the hearing had been made clear. They point to an ugly week of questioning and bitter division that reflect the equally divided situation in the country and the understandable political posturing of Democrats trying to rally their base two months out from an election.

President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on July 9, to be his Supreme Court nominee to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. From the moment Kennedy announced his retirement in July, both sides of the political aisle in the U.S. Senate and the country set to work to bolster or derail the nominee. As it is, the Democrats have a tough task to stop the process.

Equally, The Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee face the potentially insuperable obstacle in the mathematics of opposing the nomination. Without a defection from the GOP caucus in the Senate, the Democrats simply do not have the votes to stop let alone defeat the expected up and down vote on Kavanaugh that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wants by the end of the month so that Kavanagh is in place before the start of the high court’s new term in October.

What, then, is left to the Left?

The strategy of the Democrat minority in the Senate and on the committee is essentially the same that they tried against Neil Gorsuch only with greater vehemence, vitriol and perhaps significantly more ammunition.

Since July, the writings, speeches, opinions – both legal and personal – and background of the nominee have been subject to intense scrutiny. This is true for every nominee in the modern era and above all a nominee presented by a Republican president. Nominees typically are targeted ruthlessly by special interest groups, as Judge Robert Bork discovered in 1987 when his infamous nomination process ended with his defeat in the Senate. Since then, his name has been a verb to describe the treatment of would-be Supreme Court Justices. In other words, Kavanaugh is likely this week to be “Borked.”

The Democrats on the committee and their leadership in the Senate have already been trying this strategy. It failed conspicuously with Gorsuch, but Kavanaugh has one of the most expansive paper trails of any recent Supreme Court nominee. He served for more than a decade on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, five years as a lawyer in the White House Counsel's office in the George W. Bush administration and was a member of the legal team of Special Counsel Ken Starr that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998-1999. Democrats on the hearing’s first day were especially vocal in complaining that 100,000 pages of Kavanaugh’s background had been placed under Executive Privilege and that another 42,000 pages from his time in the Bush Administration had been handed over only the night before.

Having failed – as they knew they would – to stop the proceedings with procedural maneuvers, Democrat members on the committee embraced the Bork stratagem with great enthusiasm. One by one, they minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee spoke in apocalyptic terms about the nominee. They focused especially on his presumed threat to Roe v. Wade, minority rights, financial regulation and especially whether he would be an independent voice against the ambitions of the Executive Branch and its Chief Executive, Donald Trump, whom they openly despise.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) already under intense pressure by the increasingly enraged progressive movement declared, “The impact of overturning Roe is much broader than a woman’s right to choose, it’s about protecting from governmental intrusion, who to marry, where to send children to school, medical care at end of life and whether or when to have a family.”

She was joined in similar rhetoric by the other Democrat members of the committee, in particular the liberal Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) who are expected to run for the Democrat nomination for president in 2020 and therefore are positioning themselves with the party’s left-leaning base. Booker has already declared that he will vote no and has called blocking Kavanaugh a “moral moment,” adding that “you are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.” In his opening statement, Booker called Kavanaugh a tool for special interests. "It seems to so clear that in your courts,” he intoned, “the same folks seem to win over and over again: the powerful, the privileged, big corporations, special interests. Over and over again, the folks who lose are the folks who I came to Washington to fight for: working folks, consumers, women, immigrants, minorities, the disadvantaged, the poor.”

Harris continued to question the absence of documents and Kavanaugh’s adherence to “deeply conservative partisan agendas.” She declared that she was concerned whether he would “treat every American equally or instead show allegiance to the political party and conservative agenda” and that his “loyalty would be to the president who appointed” him and not to the U.S. Constitution.

For the Republicans, the parliamentary and numeric advantage is dependent on their ability to hold the Senate’s GOP caucus against any pressure on some of their members to defect. So far, they have reason to be confident. The Republican members of the committee spoke as would be expected in support of Judge Kavanaugh, but they are adopting a mostly low key defensive posture.

When at last Kavanaugh’s moment came on day one, he was introduced by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who praised his record and his mind. "His intellect,” she said, “is unquestioned. His judgement is highly regarded. And I can personally attest to his character and integrity as a colleague.”

His opening statement was not filled with soaring imagery but, as throughout the nomination process, he ticked off all of the right boxes. He complimented his mentor and friend, Justice Kennedy, for whom he clerked. He described Kennedy as “a model of civility and collegiality. He fiercely defended the independence of the Judiciary. And he was a champion of liberty.”

Kavanaugh then said, “A good judge must be an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy…I don’t decide cases based on personal or policy preferences. I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I am not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge. I am a pro-law judge.” He also noted, “If confirmed to the Court, I would be part of a Team of Nine, committed to deciding cases according to the Constitution and laws of the United States. I would always strive to be a team player on the Team of Nine.”

As with the future Justice Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh now must face absolutely withering attacks on his character, record, temperament, allegiances, faith and principles. The interrogation will be conducted by Democrat members determined to portray him as a radical threat to the country. As with all nominations, everything will depend on how Kavanaugh responds to the frontal assaults as well as the inevitable surprises and “gotcha” moments. With his long record of government and judicial service, he will face tough questions.

Ultimately, Kavanaugh’s seat on the High Court is in his own hands. The GOP members seemed content with Judge Kavanaugh’s opening statement, cautiously worded as it was. The Republicans know quite well that they can only run interference for him so far. It will be a nasty week but at the end of it, the Judge will be on his way to becoming a Justice or Donald Trump will have to find himself a new nominee. </s> The Senate is set to vote Friday morning on the first step to confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court following the release of an FBI report on allegations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh.

Senators had one day to review a confidential supplemental background check into Kavanaugh's behavior in the early-to-mid 1980s when he was in high school and college. The closely guarded collection of interviews is celebrated by Republican leaders as concrete proof that Kavanaugh did not harass or abuse women. Democrats say the interviews, which they originally requested, are incomplete and inconclusive.

The FBI report has done little to alleviate a bitter partisan fight over Kavanaugh's nomination. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says the Senate will proceed anyway on a Friday procedural vote that could pave the way for a final confirmation vote on Saturday.

"What we know for sure is the FBI report did not corroborate any of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh," McConnell said at a press conference. "The second thing we know for sure is that there's no way anything we did would satisfy the Democrats."

Kavanaugh took an unusual step to boost his nomination Thursday evening, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal expressing regret for the heated tone of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, including comments decrying Democratic attacks that was seen by some wavering senators as too partisan.

"I was very emotional last Thursday, more so than I have ever been. I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said," Kavanaugh wrote.

McConnell needs 51 votes to clear the procedural hurdle on Friday. Republicans have enough votes to meet that bar on their own, but only if they win the support of Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, who have withheld judgement while the FBI completed its work.

All three spent hours in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol Thursday reviewing the roughly 45 pages of FBI interviews. Collins and Flake both say the investigation was thorough, but neither would say if they are now prepared to vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

Flake forced Republicans to launch the additional investigation last week after a tense negotiation with Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats. Flake spent a large portion of the afternoon reviewing the FBI work and said he saw no new evidence to corroborate any of the claims against Kavanaugh, which Flake had previously indicated would mean he will vote to confirm.

Democrats saw something very different in the report. Several criticized Republicans for limiting the FBI investigation to just nine interviews. They said the process ignored many potential witnesses, including Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who first accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in the 1980's.

The FBI also did not interview Kavanaugh.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said those issues raised serious doubts about Kavanaugh and his qualifications.

"Judge Kavanaugh stated at his hearing that the individuals at the incident involving Dr. Ford refuted her version of events," Schumer said. "From their own public statements, we knew that to be false, and nothing in this report changes that."

Similar concerns moved Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., to announce Thursday that she would oppose Kavanaugh. Heitkamp is one of the most vulnerable Democrats on the ballot in November and has seen her poll numbers slip in recent weeks. She's running for re-election in a state president Trump won in 2016 by more than 35 points.

Heitkamp said she was troubled by Kavanaugh's aggressive appearance before the Senate Judiciary committee and the message his confirmation would send to women and girls across the country.

"When considering a lifetime appointment to Supreme Court, we must evaluate the totality of the circumstances and record before us," Heitkamp said in a statement. "In addition to the concerns about his past conduct, last Thursday's hearing called into question Judge Kavanaugh's current temperament, honesty, and impartiality."

Her opposition leaves Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the only undecided Democrat. He is also in a tough reelection campaign and was silent on Kavanaugh in the days leading up to the vote.

The nomination now hangs on the decisions of Collins, Murkowski, Flake and Manchin.
A cloture vote on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh passes 51–49. A final confirmation vote is set to occur on Saturday.