Really excellent timing for an article in which Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), declares her intention to run for re-election. It comes out the very day the House flips to the Democrats, following a massive blue wave sweeping Republicans out.
"That is my intention," she told Time, apparently in an office in the Capitol that's one of the perks she gets for seniority. Here's what she has in that office, still.
Two newspapers with reports on Kavanaugh's contentious confirmation hearings sit on the wooden desk: a copy of the New York Times, with an image of Kavanaugh's now infamous high school calendar on the front page, and the Washington Post from the following day, showing Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused the judge of sexual assault, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, both of them near tears.
She keeps that in this office, in which she does interviews, and then pretends that she’s not doing this out of partisan politics. She tells Time that she was "baffled" when her constituents rose up against the Kavanaugh nomination, asking her to represent them. "I would never be intimidated by that," she says. But brave, brave Collins prevailed. "It is certainly obvious to me," she says, "that my life would have been a lot easier if I had voted the other way." The way her constituents were asking her to, she means.
This all under the headline: "Susan Collins Is Trying to Stay in the Political Center. But That May Not Exist Anymore."
Collins is doing no such thing. She declared her fealty to Republicans and, worse, to Individual 1. She's voted with Trump 77 percent of the time. Worse. She voted for Brett Kavanaugh, an unqualified, partisan, forced-birther ideologue, not even to mention the extremely credible (and multiple) sexual assault allegations against him.
So here's my personal (and only, so far) New Years resolution: Making the next two years of Collins' political life sheer hell.
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