WASHINGTON, DC (AP) — Emotionally battling to rescue his Supreme Court nomination, Brett Kavanaugh yesterday denied allegations that he’d sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when both were high school students and told Congress the accusations and biting criticism by Democrats had “totally and permanently destroyed” his family and reputation.

Sometimes showing anger, other times fighting back tears, the conservative jurist launched a bristling attack on the “national disgrace” of his treatment by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Referring to the Constitution’s charge to senators in confirming high officials, he said, “You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.”

He vowed to continue his effort to join the high court, to which President Donald Trump nominated him in July. Now a judge in the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, he seemed assured of confirmation until Ford and several other accusers emerged in recent weeks. He has denied all of the accusations, but it remained unclear how the dramatic testimony by Ford and Kavanaugh would affect his prospects.

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit, never,” he said.

Shortly before, Ford had told the same senators that she was “100 per cent” certain a drunken young Kavanaugh was the one who had pinned her to a bed, tried to remove her clothes and clapped a hand over her mouth as she tried to yell for help. A Kavanaugh friend stood by and they both laughed uproariously during the incident, she testified.

In her three hours of testimony, Ford’s tone was polite but firm as she detailed her accusations but offered no major new revelations. Rachel Mitchell, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor from Arizona who asked all questions for the committee’s all-male GOP senators, seemed to elicit no significant inconsistencies in her testimony.

Both Kavanaugh and Ford testified under sworn oath.

Kavanaugh, 53, struggled to hold back tears, particularly when he referred to his own family.

Asked about drinking in high school, he said he had, sometimes to excess. “I like beer,” he said, but he also said he’d never passed out and never attacked Ford. “I have never done this to her or to anyone,” he said.

The mood was intense as Kavanaugh’s voice filled the room for the extraordinary session, unlike Ford’s quiet testimony. Senators watched intently, the only sound the clicking of cameras. In the front row, family and friends quietly cried including his wife, Ashley, whose lips were trembling.

In an election-season battle being waged along a polarised nation’s political and cultural fault lines, Trump and most Republicans have rallied behind Kavanaugh, whose confirmation would provide a chance to cement the conservative majority of the court for a generation.

Republicans have accused Ford and the other women of making unproven allegations and have questioned why they’d not publicly revealed them for decades.

Among the television viewers yesterday was Trump, who has mocked the credibility of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The president watched aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington from the United Nations, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

During a break in the hearing, some of Kavanaugh’s strongest supporters gave no indications of wavering.

“You need more than an accusation for evidence. You need corroboration. That’s what’s missing here,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Cornyn of Texas.

But Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said of Ford, “She’s a good witness. She’s articulate, an attractive person.”

Ford, now 51, has said of Kavanaugh, “I believed he was going to rape me.”

Asked by Patrick Leahy of Vermont for her strongest memory of the alleged incident, Ford mentioned the two boys’ “laughter — the uproarious laughter between the two and they’re having fun at my expense”.

When the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, asked how she could be sure that Kavanaugh was the attacker, Ford said, “The same way I’m sure I’m talking to you right now.” Later, she told Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill, that her certainty was “100 per cent”.