“Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday they will not be questioning Christine Blasey Ford about her sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh later this week. Instead, they are hiring a woman as outside counsel to do it for them,” the HuffPost reports.

“There’s a simple reason Republicans are doing this: Every GOP senator on the committee is male, and they don’t want to be seen as bullying a woman who is speaking out about being sexually assaulted as a teenager.”

Roll Call: “But the identity of that counsel remained an enigma Tuesday.”

Nate Silver: “There are huge risks to the GOP in both rushing to confirm Kavanaugh and in letting the process play out for several more weeks — which means that encouraging Kavanaugh to withdraw now, however painful it might be, is probably their least-worst option.”

“There is one other possibility, which is that McConnell — who reportedly didn’t want Kavanaugh to be chosen in the first place — could be rushing through the process in the hopes that Kavanaugh will be voted down (or forced to withdraw once it becomes clear that McConnell doesn’t have the votes). Back when Ford was Kavanaugh’s only accuser, this had seemed like a fairly likely exit strategy: The hearings would be engineered to allow Kavanaugh to save face, and perhaps to allow Republicans to stoke some grievances with their base. But wavering GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Jeff Flake would find some excuse to oppose his nomination and his nomination would be pulled. This scenario still seems like a distinct possibility — but the fact that the Kavanaugh story is developing so rapidly, with the stakes continuously increasing with every news cycle, could mean that McConnell is now pot-committed to the bluff even if he’d been hoping to keep his options open before.”