38 new york | february 17–march 1, 2020
Collins, who agreed to help. The stimulus bill that passed, Reid told
me, “wasn’t as good as Obama wanted it to be” (in part because Col-
lins worked to reduce its scope before she signed up), “but the reason
I give you that example is to show you how she’s changed.”
Reid no longer sees her as a moderating force. “I think one of
the reasons that Susan was moderate was because of Olympia
Snowe, who was really moderate,” he said. “Susan votes 90 per-
cent of the time with Trump. It’s hard to claim you’re a moderate
when that happens.”
Reid particularly noted Collins’s role in the confirmation of Betsy
DeVos, the Education secretary who has, among other things, cut
funding for the Special Olympics. As a member of the Senate Educa-
tion Committee, Collins could have voted to give DeVos a negative
recommendation, but she didn’t. Yet once DeVos was in front of the
whole Senate, and had enough votes to get through, Collins voted
against her, an example of Collins not using her vote powerfully
when she had the opportunity, a pattern even more evident when it
comes to her votes on Trump’s judges.
Collins has said that she has voted for the judicial appointments
of all the presidents she’s served under (98 percent for Clinton’s
judges, 99 percent for Bush’s, 94 percent for Obama’s, and 95 per-
cent for Trump’s). But the previous presidents Collins hasworked
under have not nominated the record number of young, unquali-
fied, radical right-wing judges to lifetime appointments that Trump
has, reshaping the federal judiciary for decades to come.
When Republicans held a narrow majority in the Senate in the
first two years of Trump’s term, Collins voted the party line.She was
a crucial vote to confirm Leonard Grasz, who had previously
described what he sees as the “moral bankruptcy” of Roev. Wade
and suggested that the term “sexual orientation” could open the
doors to bigamy and pedophilia. But since Republicans have
increased their majority and gained more wiggle room, Collins has
begun voting against some of Trump’s judicial appointments, citing,
in several cases, anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ views thatdid not
stop her vote when her party needed it. In other words, she’s only
willing to go out on a limb when it’s easy to do so, not hard.
THE VOTE TO CONFIRM BRETT KAVANAUGH was a particular
turning point. Collins supported the (half-baked) FBI investigation
into what had happened. Women and men frantically metwith the
senator, advocating their side, telling her of their experiences. Some
were Kavanaugh defenders, like Sarah Day, who wrote to both Col-
lins and King (and published a public letter) vouching for Kava-
naugh’s character, having worked with him in the White House.
Mindy Woerter, 35, is not registered with a political party,
though the Maine native has consistently voted for Collins. In
August 2018, Woerter was part of a group that traveled to Wash-
ington with Planned Parenthood in advance of the Kavanaugh
confirmation, to tell Collins the story of her 2016 abortion, a
procedure that, because her husband works for the federal gov-
ernment in shipbuilding, could not be paid for using his federal
health insurance, thanks to the Hyde Amendment.
As the meeting started, Woerter recalled, Collins didn’t even
address the storytellers. Instead, Woerter said, “she wasvery fo-
cused on her displeasure with the advocacy organization” and
spoke only to the Planned Parenthood representatives, telling
them that “she hadn’t appreciated the way people hadtreated
her at an earlier event.” Collins was referring to having been
commencement speaker at Colby College’s 2018 graduation, to
which much of the graduating class had worn i stand with
planned parenthood stickers, not as an explicit protest but as
a n of ommitment to re tive
h ing ing along the li You
should all be nicer to me,’ ” said Woerter. Eventually, Woerter and
her companions got to tell their stories. “She did say a couple of
times that she was really sorry, and that that must have been a
hard time to go through.” But the meeting ended quickly, after
Collins offered up some of the reasons she felt Kavanaugh would
not overturn Roe. “It definitely gave the feeling, leaving,” said
Woerter, “that there was no chance of persuading her.”
Collins announced her decision in a 45-minute speech on the
Senate floor, in which she defended her decision to confirm Kava-
naugh and excoriated activists and critics who had raised their
voices in protest. In her speech, Collins decried the “gutter-level
political campaign” waged against Kavanaugh by “dark money” and
“special-interest groups” (groups that presumably included Planned
Parenthood, the organization that had last given her an award just
the previous year), portraying Kavanaugh as the real victim.
For many, it was a turning point. “That speech was just beyond
the pale,” said Joann Inman, a retired teacher who haslived in
Aroostook County for six decades, a registered Democrat who
voted for Collins multiple times. “Fine, you took your vote. You
don’t have to rub our faces in it.” Her vote for Kavanaugh led to
a lining of Collins’s coffers; in the fall of 2018, Collins raised
$1.8 million, most of it from out of state. It was the best fund-
raising quarter of her career at the time. The previous quarter, by
comparison, she had received $140,000 in contributions.A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, Collins remains eager to advertise her
credentials as a moderate, pointing out in an email that she’s “proud
of the fact that year after year I’ve been named the No. 1 most bipar-
tisan senator,” and citing relationships between Ronald Reagan and
Tip O’Neill and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich as evidence that
“people of principles did find common ground.” Spokeswoman
Annie Clark told me, as opening arguments got under way in the
impeachment trial, about how a handful of handwritten changes to
the procedural rules—changes that meant opening statements
could extend over three days, not two—were shifts that herboss felt
“were very significant.”
“She raised some concerns,” Clark told me, noting that Collins
had been very satisfied with the outcome.
Collins’s “concern” about the overreach of her party or president
has become a punch line. John Oliver has done a game-show bit
called “Hope Susan Collins Flips and Be Disappointed When She
Doesn’t,” while on Saturday Night Live, Cecily Strong’s Collins
declares that presidential misbehavior “makes me want to shake my
head vigorously and wag my finger once, perhaps twice” and “write
a strongly worded email and send it straight to my drafts folder.”
But the political press continues to treat Collins as if she might
vote in a manner completely contrary to everything we’velearned
about her in the past three years. When she was weighing the ques-
tion of whether to vote for witnesses in the Senate trial, she earned
breathless headlines trumpeting the possibility. It was a cycle that
created the illusion of consequential independence withouther ever
having to cast a consequential vote.
For a long time, Collins has profited from collective fantasies
about women in politics being inherently more reasonable, more
naturally inclined toward collaboration and moderation. The
mostly white women of the GOP have been imagined to be more
practical and less ideologically driven than their male counterparts,
more willing to work together toward functional, civilized
compromise—especially with their female peers in the other party.
And indeed, Collins’s ties with other women in the Senate, from
both parties, have been strong; she was credited with spearheading
the bipartisan group of women that hammered out a budget deal
in 2013 when the rest of the Senate was deadlocked. When Collins
got engaged in 2012, Hillary Clinton threw her a shower with a
guest list that included all 17 women then serving in theSenate.
Kirsten Gillibrand told me once of Collins, “Susan’s worldview is
similar to my worldview, which is that we’re here to help people,