Senator Susan Collins on the Senate floor during Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing on October 5, 2018

Dear Commons Community,

Lauren Sandler, a journalist and the author of Righteous, One and Only, has an op-ed in The Huffington Post, scorching  Senator Susan Collins (Republican – Maine) for selling out feminism by her performance and ultimate vote in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.  Here is an excerpt:

“The vote was bad enough. Sending a man the majority of Americans believe to have sexually assaulted someone to the court, conferring supreme judicial power to a second fabulist accused of sexual misconduct. Granting this man decisive power over the nation’s current and future female bodies. Swinging open the door for the real backlash against women’s outrage. But she not only sold out women’s bodies to confirm a Supreme Court justice selected explicitly to imprison them in enforced pregnancies: She dressed that vote up as a feminist call to arms.

Sen. Susan Collins could have simply, quietly, disappointingly voted to confirm this man. Instead, she ostentatiously wrapped her confirmation in a false feminine bow, grandstanding on the Senate floor for nearly 45 minutes. She dressed head to toe in taupe, the color of neutrality, and told women that the lesson of Christine Blasey Ford’s lasting trauma is that if Brett Kavanaugh committed such crimes on her 15-year-old body, Ford should have reported it.

Collins, Our Lady of Perpetual Moral Bankruptcy, droned on about how many survivors’ stories she’d heard over the preceding days, aligning herself with the popular rhetoric around believing women. Just not this one, she painstakingly attempted to explain, using debunked junk science, disregarding any credible neuropsychology about how trauma affects memory ― the very science Ford teaches at the university level, and which she explained patiently through her own testimony as her own expert witness.

Collins could have simply, quietly, disappointingly voted to confirm this man. Instead, she ostentatiously wrapped her confirmation in a false feminine bow.

It’s perhaps the ultimate anti-woman double-sided coin, to simultaneously dismiss both a woman’s expertise and her story. Blithely rejecting both her academic rigor and her sworn testimony ― whose hand was over her mouth, whose face pressed up against hers, whose cruel laughter rang forever in her ears, what she testified she was 100 percent certain about.

These days, such offenses against women must be prettied up in fake feminism. Collins paired her dismissal of Ford’s trauma with a cri de coeur, calling for increased reporting of sexual harassment and assault. “We must listen to survivors, and every day we must seek to stop the criminal behavior that has hurt so many,” she said. “We owe this to ourselves, our children, and generations to come” ― so long as it’s politically expedient.

Watching Ford’s hours of detailed, self-critical testimony, millions of us sat suspended in fear that our elected officials would not believe her. But then a worse fear crept in: that they would believe her, and it wouldn’t matter.

The best argument Collins could find for disbelieving Ford was a theory that one of Kavanaugh’s friends, Ed Whelan, the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, had floated on Twitter: Sure, she was sexually assaulted, but she must have the wrong guy. Almost immediately, Whelan apologized for this “appalling and inexcusable” lack of judgment in suggesting such a thing, and offered his resignation. But that appalling and inexcusable theory was exactly what Collins cited to tear Ford down and make the case that women must feel empowered to report their own assaults. That’s how incredible her disbelief is. And how cynical her politics.

The brutal truth is that her cynicism paid off. After Collins voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, her standing among Maine’s Republicans was shaky. After condemning Ford and confirming Kavanaugh, she won back their support. It’s a scourge of our age, and of the ages: women whose politics are dictated by the power of their white skin rather than the power denied to their organs.”

This is an insightful op-ed that tells it like it is.  For all of Collings’ grandstanding during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, when it came time to vote, it was the party first above everything else even her own moral compass.

Tony

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