Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast.

Brett Kavanaugh is going to be on the United States Supreme Court.

We're going to talk about that.

An extraordinary Friday at the U.S. Capitol, I'm Scott Detro, I cover Congress.

I'm Kelsey Snowley, I also cover Congress.

I'm Aisha Roscoe, I cover the White House.

And I'm Tim Mac, political reporter.

So it's pretty clear, by the slimmest of margins Brett Kavanaugh is headed to the Supreme

Court.

And walk us through when that became crystal clear on Friday.

It became crystal clear within a matter of minutes, when Susan Collins, the Republican

Senator from Maine announced on the Senate floor after more than 40 minutes of talking, that

she was going to be supporting Kavanaugh.

And then just a few minutes later, Joe mentioned the Democrat from West Virginia announced

that he would also be supporting Kavanaugh.

And that brought us to very clearly locked in, yes, votes.

And we're going to circle back to Collins in a moment, but 5149 is how that key cloture

vote had played out earlier Friday.

At the time we thought there was still a chance that people could change their mind, but

Kelsey was that really a clear moment where it was like, okay, this looks like it's probably

going to happen?

It did look that way.

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