Susan Collins is rattled

| 9:47 pm EDT September 16, 2018
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We’ve seen Republican Senator Susan Collins do the right thing by going against her party to save Obamacare. We’ve seen her do the wrong thing by voting in favor of her party’s tax scam for the wealthy. It all seems to come down to a calculation on her part about how much she can do to please her wealthy donors, and how much she feels she has to do to keep voters from ousting her. Now that Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser has come forward, and Kavanaugh is becoming more radioactive by the minute, how has this changed Collins’ math? Suffice it to say that she’s rattled.

Senator Collins was walking through an airport late on Sunday when a CNN reporter began walking alongside her and asking questions while a camera rolled. Collins tends to speak deliberately and choose her words carefully. But this interview revealed something different: she’s rattled. Gone was the brief angry defiance she’d showed earlier this week when a group raised a million dollars for her 2020 opponent if she votes “yes.” Instead she seemed to timidly waffle about the matter from one sentence to the next.

Collins said she was “very surprised” at the accusation, which is usually the kind of thing you often say when you’re trying to lay the groundwork for reverting course on something. She also said that “it’s an issue that I brought up with him last Friday and he denied,” which could be interpreted as her saying she believes him, or her suggesting that she’s surprised he lied to her. That’s the whole point, of course.

When you’re in the middle and you know you’re going to have to end up going against one side, you try to drag it out as long as you, so you point out to the side you’ve gone against that you did indeed try to hold out as long as you could. So it wasn’t surprising to see Susan Collins tell CNN that “I’m going to be talking with my colleagues” about whether to delay the vote. Jeff Flake has already given her cover by being the first Republican to call for a delayed committee vote. We’ll see what Collins does now – but it’s clear she’s rattled.