The show’s ending is preordained: “All the Republicans will vote yes; all the Democrats will vote no,” Graham said. He was really just holding the hearings to be polite. And then he puffed himself up on sanctimony and warned that everyone should be on their best behavior because “the world is watching.”

What exactly did the world see — if it hasn’t already turned away from this country in horror? It saw children used as messaging devices. It saw Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) describe the 2018 confirmation hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh as a “freak show,” because apparently asking a Supreme Court nominee to address credible accusations of sexual assault is against the natural order of things. “It looked like the cantina bar scene out of ‘Star Wars,’ ” Kennedy added. The world saw flailing Democrats and self-righteous Republicans.

And the world saw Barrett. She sat at the witness table in the center of it all wearing a non-wrinkling dress in a jubilant shade of magenta, a strand of pearls and a dark face mask. And while the hearing was ostensibly about Barrett, she spent the vast majority of it silent and nearly immobile. It was a feat of self-control that she didn’t appear to fidget or even furrow her brow. She didn’t fold her arms across her chest in a defensive posture as Democrats declared her a menace to liberal society. She didn’t lean in as Republicans anointed her a maternal Wonder Woman in judicial robes.

Barrett simply sat and blinked. And when she finally spoke, for just about 12 minutes, it was to make a few key points about her cultural identity. If confirmed, she would be the only justice who had not attended those bastions of East Coast elitism, Harvard or Yale; she graduated law school at Notre Dame. She believes in the power of prayer.

And she would be the first mother of school-age children to serve on the court.