Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[I]t turns out Susan Collins is no Jim Jeffords. Probably she never was.
As the confirmation vote for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court drew near, those opposed to Kavanaugh may have hoped Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, would follow the example of Jim Jeffords, the late senator from Vermont, who showed the world how it was possible to stand up to his party’s leadership.
Jeffords was one of that dwindling species, a moderate Northeastern Republican, and he had long been a problem for his increasingly conservative party. Then in May 2001, he took a step that seems even more audacious and dramatic today than it did at the time. He bolted the party entirely, declaring himself an independent and causing control of the Senate to switch, by the narrowest of margins, from Republican to Democrat. The majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, had to surrender his post to Tom Daschle of South Dakota. All those Republican committee chairmen were forced to give up their posts, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
No one expected Collins to abandon her party, but many were hoping she would defy her president and the Senate leadership on the Kavanaugh vote. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had already declared her intention to vote no, and if all Democrats had held, Collins and Murkowski could have made the difference.
But the historical moment for Collins differed significantly from the moment in 2001 that defined Jeffords’ career. Jeffords’ action took place during the first year of George W. Bush’s first term and was the culmination of a long history of differences between Jeffords and his party on a host of issues, including education, taxes, the environment, and campaign finance. With the rise of a fiercely partisan conservative movement led by Rep. Newt Gingrich, who engineered the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, Jeffords was increasingly an outsider in his own party. When he concluded that the Bush administration would not keep promises made to him on money for education, choosing instead to push through major budget deficits, Jeffords quit the party altogether.
In response to Jeffords’ action, the party could have moderated itself in order to prevent further defections from its more liberal wing. But the rightward movement continued, gaining new momentum following the economic meltdown of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama.
It was in the wake of Obama’s election that Sen. Mitch McConnell declared that the primary aim of Republicans in the Senate was to ensure Obama’s failure. Collins parted ways with McConnell on Obamacare, helping to secure its passage, and she has been a defender of reproductive rights. But Senate observers say she has always been a mainstream conservative, not inclined to buck the party’s leadership.
If Democrats’ hopes for defeating Kavanaugh depended on Collins’ vote, they were counting on a long shot. Her statement when she announced her decision had the appearance of a speech long in the works. It seemed she had not been agonizing over her decision at all.
It was striking to hear her words of concern about the fairness, or its lack, of the treatment received by Kavanaugh. Fairness is not a word associated with the Republicans on the question of Supreme Court nominees. Since McConnell refused to allow a vote for Obama’s 2016 nominee, Merrick Garland, Democrats have complained about a degree of unfairness that has assaulted the checks and balances fundamental to the Constitution.
Democrats responded to Kavanaugh’s confirmation with anguished declarations that warfare between the parties and divisions within the body politic had reached a new high pitch — with the Garland obstruction followed by the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh seen as an act of shameless political thuggery.
It may be that the saga of Garland, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh is best seen as a continuation of a war that has been underway since Gingrich’s ascension in 1994, since the defection of Jeffords in 2001 and the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. As one longtime observer of these machinations told me, Collins’ vote and Kavanaugh’s confirmation are the “logical culmination” of what has been happening for decades. In these instances, the Republicans have shown merely that they are better at winning the battles making up a war that has been under way for a long time.
Jeffords’ defection in 2001 was greeted by many Vermonters as a brave and heroic action by a man of conscience. He was risking long friendships among fellow Republicans and making himself a party of one. But the statement he read to a crowded gathering of national media on May 24, 2001, at a hotel in Burlington placed his action in a long tradition of independent-minded Vermont politicians. In doing so, he became a sort of folk hero in Vermont, a status that endured until his death in 2014.
Susan Collins may be a hero to some. As a Republican from Maine, she has a Trumpian right-wing element she must cater to, and so her vote for Kavanaugh may have helped protect her right flank politically. But in helping to thrust her party further within the embrace of the party’s Trumpian wing, she has helped to color the party in a way that Jeffords would never recognize.