Maine resident and Barnard College English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan has had quite enough of Susan Collins, the state's "centrist" senator and the nation's Republican "maverick":
"[Collins has often voted] with the most right-wing members of her party, even while attempting to occupy some imaginary moral high ground.…. [And] in giving him a victory on Judge Kavanaugh, she has emboldened Mr. Trump to continue down the very path she claims to detest: denigrating women, bullying opponents, choosing the most combative approach to every disagreement…. In so doing, she has proved herself, in the end, to stand for nothing."
That, perhaps, is why fellow senator Lindsey Graham — who, writes Frank Bruni, "gushes so much [about Trump] that he makes Rudy Giuliani look withholding" — said of Collins' yes vote on Kavanaugh: "You did a good thing." For Graham himself has come to stand for nothing, if one doesn't count his cringeworthy toadyism toward the equally principles-indifferent president.
Collins is the most easily fooled of all U.S. senators, because she wants to be fooled. Classic was her January gullibility, that being when she reportedly strong-armed Mitch McConnell into guaranteeing votes to strengthen certain elements of Obamacare in exchange for her vote for Trump's outrageously counterproductive tax bill. She threatened "consequences" if McConnell failed to live up to his word. He didn't, no consequences ensued, and Collins blithely went on her way. The majority leader saw what Ms. Boylan sees: Collins was merely fooling herself so as to "occupy some imaginary moral high ground."
She did it again when she said — she actually said — that "my fervent hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-to-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored." If the restoration of public confidence in the Supreme Court was one of the Senate's main goals, then confirming Kavanaugh was as conspicuously counterproductive as Trump's tax bill.
Her melodramatic floor speech last Friday reaped praise from a few surprising sources, such as veteran political reporter Carl Hulse, who should know better. "She made perhaps the best Republican case so far for the embattled judge," effused Hulse that same day. "She … delivered a reasoned, carefully researched, 45-minute point-by-point defense of her support for Judge Kavanaugh…. It was Ms. Collins on display as a studious former staff member, marshaling information gleaned in extensive conversations with Judge Kavanaugh and legal experts." One of her defensive points was that "we will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon innocence and fairness." Sound reasoning as far as it goes, but innocence and fairness also require prudence and good judgment when weighing momentous nominations such as Kavanaugh's supremely troubled one.
In one way I can understand Hulse's applause. Like millions of others, he was probably desperate to find some virtue remaining in congressional Republicans. This ghastly party of thugs, demagogues and nihilists has been shorn of any ethics for so long, one yearns for even the smallest sign of lingering decency. We found that last week in Sen. Lisa Murkowski. But one Republican senator wasn't enough to keep the truth-challenged Kavanaugh off the highest bench. We needed one more. I scarcely believed Susan Collins would be that additional no vote, but given Jeff Flake's liberated circumstance (he's retiring), I did believe he just might rise to the occasion.
My belief was misplaced. Because the Republican Party is an almost entirely degenerate collection of … see preceding paragraph … from Sen. Collins on down.