Susan Collins Finds Herself Targeted in 2020 for Support of Kavanaugh

As a former Republican of many years, I am continually disgusted by the moral bankruptcy that now defines the GOP, lies, deceits, hatred of others, and support for Trump, a man devoid on any morality and decency now define the party  One of the few Republican senators who has avoided a full embrace of the reprehensible has been Susan Collins of Maine.  Now, however, with her apparent support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Collins seems poised to join the rest of her amoral party.  Not surprisingly, many of her constituents are up in arms for numerous reasons, not the least of which is Kavanaugh's likely perjury before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Add to that his disturbing views of women's rights, abortion, the unrestrained power of the presidency, and the deference he would give to special rights demanded by Christofascists, and there is clearly grounds for a revolt against Collins if she votes for Kavanaugh.  (A New York Daily News piece which I cannot access since I am in the UK currently also indicates that Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconduct).  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Exceptional dangers require exceptional and sometimes unusual responses.  This was the spirit animating the volunteers at a phone bank here Tuesday night. They were asking citizens to urge their state’s popular Republican senator, Susan Collins, to oppose the confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And if they found a sympathizer, they took an additional and, for some, a controversial step: Asking for a commitment to contribute to a fund that would be activated against Collins (her term is up in 2020) if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

The campaign is spearheaded by Mainers for Accountable Leadership and Maine People’s Alliance, and it has outraged Collins, a consensus seeker who issued an unusually sharp retort: “Attempts at bribery or extortion will not influence my vote at all.” The organizers were unapologetic. “The idea of Susan Collins attacking an effort by 35,000 small-dollar donors as bribery is politics at its worst,” Marie Follayttar Smith, the Accountable Leadership group’s co-director, said in a statement. “We absolutely have the right to prepare to unseat her given everything Judge Kavanaugh would do on the Supreme Court to make life worse for Maine women.”

[T]here is this irony: Kavanaugh himself is, as the legal scholar Richard Hasen wrote recently in Slate, “deeply skeptical of even the most basic campaign-finance limits.”

It is one of a host of ways in which Kavanaugh would likely push the Supreme Court well to the right, because he would replace retired justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a more moderate conservative.

For the activists here and for many others around the country, the fears around Kavanaugh’s nomination begin with abortion rights. But the catalogue is much more extensive, reflecting the broad array of concerns of the activists mobilizing against him.

Ben Gaines worried that Kavanaugh would look for ways to side with President Trump in a dispute over special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Dini Merz has the same apprehension, and also mentioned Kavanaugh’s views on “corporate power” and “religion and its role” in American life.

Follayttar Smith spoke of the likelihood Kavanaugh would roll back environmental regulations and the Affordable Care Act. Susie Crimmins saw him as “dismantling government in its role of protecting the marginalized.” Louise Lora Somlyo felt that Kavanaugh had not been candid in his testimony before the Senate. Collins is an unusual Republican who has, by turns, both gratified and infuriated liberals in her state. Alicia Barnes, a Navy veteran, said Collins “had our backs” during the campaign by LGBTQ groups to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; Smith spoke of the appreciation across the state for Collins’s vote to defend the Affordable Care Act.

But Collins’s later vote for the Republican tax cut was a reminder of how often she has been loyal to her party’s leadership, and Bill Nemitz, a veteran columnist for the Portland Press-Herald, wrote a passionate column last weekend suggesting a vote for Kavanaugh would be a breaking point.

With Senate Democrats now sharply questioning whether Kavanaugh has been misleading (or worse) in his testimony, Collins would have a path to oppose him, and she has said that if he has not been “truthful, then obviously that would be a major problem for me.”

But there is a larger issue of hypocrisy that incites aversion to Kavanaugh. Repeatedly, Republican presidential candidates promise (usually indirectly, but, in Trump’s case, directly) they will nominate justices who would challenge Roe v. Wade and, more generally, toe a conservative line.

Once they are nominated, however, these would-be justices pretend not to hold the views they hold. And when skeptics point out their obvious evasions, defenders denounce these objections as purely partisan.

The affable Collins is now confronting the backlash to this long history of doublespeak.