Campaign Action
Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins is rallying the right wing to push back against people-powered democracy in her home state. Mainers for Accountable Leadership, the Maine People's Alliance, and Be A Hero, founded by national health care advocate and ALS patient Ady Barkan, have teamed together to crowd-source small-dollar donations in pledges.
If Collins goes against the wishes of her constituents and votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, those pledges—which now total over $1 million!—will be released to her opponent.
Collins has gotten the right-wing wurlitzer engaged on her behalf, screaming that a bunch of small-dollar donors working together is—get this—bribery. Ady Barkan has the perfect response to that:
"Senator Collins took over $5 million from PACs and large donors like the Koch brothers. In exchange, she voted to cut their taxes and take healthcare away from people like me. Senator Collins may not really know what small dollar donations are, because during her last election campaign less than 3% of her money came from small dollar donors, while 44% came from PACs, but that still doesn't excuse smearing a grassroots effort from regular people pleading with someone in a position of power to do the right thing."
Meanwhile, the pledges raised so far for a future opponent to Collins come from "more than 39,000 individual pledges ranging from $1 to the maximum allowable donation to a candidate of $2,700." That information, by the way, is from totally not a dirty-fucking-hippy elections blogger Rick Hasen, who also says that Republican "cries of bribery, illegality, and lack of principle lay bare the bankrupt campaign finance system that […] McConnell helped create and that Collins has contributed to with previous Supreme Court votes and will supersize with her likely vote to confirm Kavanaugh."
If money equals free speech, as McConnell and the Supreme Court and Collins insist that it does, then that's about 40,000 people exercising their First Amendment right to ask Susan Collins to do the right thing. This is Collins telling her constituents that plutocrats have a better chance of getting her ear than they do.
The people of Maine need to call her on this. Directly. Every day. At her office numbers: (207) 622-8414, (207) 945-0417, (207) 283-1101, (207) 493-7873, (207) 784-6969, (207) 780-3575, (202) 224-2523. But be polite. And maybe record your messages to show how polite you are, and provide those to the local media.