Susan Collins begins backing away from Brett Kavanaugh

| 7:40 pm EDT September 26, 2018
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The fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was always in the hands of GOP Senator Susan Collins and her close ally, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski. After a third woman came forward by name today to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault (and notably just before reports of an unnamed fourth accuser this evening), Collins began backing away from Kavanaugh.

Collins and Murkowski are still declining to say whether or not they’ll vote for Kavanaugh. Instead they keep calling for the Senate Judiciary Committee to take additional steps before holding a vote. Although they’re not on the committee, there would be no point in the committee approving Kavanaugh if his nomination is going to die in a subsequent full Senate vote. In light of Julie Swetwick’s assertion that Kavanaugh and his buddies were holding gang rape parties in high school, Collins is now making additional de facto demands for the committee.

Senator Collins now wants to know why the committee didn’t bother to subpoena Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, who has been named by multiple Kavanaugh accusers, according to CNN. To be clear, each time Collins stakes herself to something like this, she makes it that much harder for herself to vote “yes” if these conditions aren’t met. After all, her eventual reelection opponent could point out that Collins admitted Judge’s testimony was important, yet approved Kavanaugh without hearing Judge’s testimony.

Just minutes ago, NBC News reported that a fourth – as of yet unnamed – accuser has come forward. In this instance, Brett Kavanaugh is alleged to have drunkenly and sexually shoved a woman up against a wall in 1998, more than a decade after he finished college. Susan Collins has yet to react to this latest development. Because the fourth woman took her accusations to the Senate, it’s possible that Collins already knew about it at the time she began backing away from Kavanaugh earlier today. As always with Collins, it’s not a matter of whether you can “trust” her; she always does whatever she thinks is best for her own reelection chances.