Kavanaugh’s nomination brings passionate resistance

PORTLAND, MAINE — Exceptional dangers require exceptional and sometimes unusual responses.

This was the spirit animating the volunteers at a phone bank Tuesday night in Portland. They were asking citizens to urge their state’s popular Republican senator, Susan Collins, to oppose the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And if they found a sympathizer, they took an additional and, for some, a controversial step: Asking for a commitment to contribute to a fund that would be activated against Collins’ re-election, whose term is up in 2020, if she voted for Kavanaugh.

The campaign is spearheaded by Mainers for Accountable Leadership and Maine People’s Alliance, and it has outraged Collins, a consensus seeker who issued an unusually sharp retort: “Attempts at bribery or extortion will not influence my vote at all.”

The organizers were unapologetic. “The idea of Susan Collins attacking an effort by 35,000 small-dollar donors as bribery is politics at its worse,” Marie Follayttar Smith, the Accountable Leadership group’s co-director, said in a statement.

For those who might be understandably troubled about money’s electoral power being wielded so openly, there is this irony: Kavanaugh himself is, as the legal scholar Richard Hasen wrote recently in Slate, “deeply skeptical of even the most basic campaign-finance limits.”

It is one of a host of ways in which Kavanaugh would likely push the Supreme Court well to the right of where it is since he would replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, a more moderate conservative. That is a central reason why his nomination has generated such passionate resistance.

For the activists here and many around the country, the fears around Kavanaugh’s nomination begin with abortion rights. But the catalogue is much more extensive.

Ben Gaines worried that Kavanaugh would look for ways to side with President Trump in a dispute over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Dini Merz mentioned Kavanaugh’s views on “corporate power” and “religion and its role” in American life.

Collins is an unusual Republican who has, by turns, gratified and infuriated liberals in her state. Alicia Barnes, a Navy veteran, said Collins “had our backs” during the campaign by LGBTQ groups to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy; Follayttar Smith spoke of the appreciation across the state for Collins’ vote to defend the Affordable Care Act.

But Collins’ later vote for the Republican tax cut was a reminder of how often she has been loyal to her party’s leadership, and Bill Nemitz, a veteran columnist for the Portland Press-Herald, wrote a passionate column last weekend suggesting a vote for Kavanaugh would be a breaking point.

But there is a larger issue of hypocrisy that incites aversion to Kavanaugh. Repeatedly, Republican presidential candidates promise (usually indirectly, but, in Trump’s case, directly) that they will nominate justices who would challenge Roe v. Wade and, more generally, toe a conservative line.

Once they are nominated however, these would-be justices pretend not to hold the views they hold.

The affable Collins is now confronting the backlash to this long history of double-speak.