Of course there was a rush. They didn't want to see Kavanaugh Borked like the Democrats are known to do. Claiming as fact that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her is one reason why 70% of Americans don't trust Democrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomination
As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Joe Biden presided over Bork's hearing. Biden stated his opposition to Bork soon after the nomination, reversing an approval in an interview of a hypothetical Bork nomination he had made the previous year and angering conservatives who thought he could not conduct the hearings dispassionately. At the close of the hearings, Biden won praise for conducting the proceedings fairly and with good humor and courage, as his 1988 presidential campaign collapsed in the middle of the hearings. Rejecting some of the arguments that other Bork opponents were making,[20] Biden framed his discussion around the belief that the Constitution provides rights to liberty and privacy that extend beyond those explicitly enumerated in the text, and that Bork's strong originalism was ideologically incompatible with that view.
You have to have serious problems to be borked. Kav does.