January 30, 2022

Susan Collins Signals She’ll Hinder Crucial Biden Priorities

The GOP senator is back at doing what she does best: enraging the political left.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

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Susan Collins, the moderate Republican senator from Maine, has occasionally broken ranks with her party to stand up for what she thought was right. She voted to convict former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, and she voted not to confirm Trump’s hastily selected Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death just weeks before the 2020 election.

But now Collins has returned in fine form to the role for which so many Democrats loathe her. In her typical noncommittal fashion, she’s refusing to say where she stands on two of Democrats’ biggest current priorities: confirming a Biden nominee for the Supreme Court, and preventing Trump from ever holding office again.

In an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Collins refused to say that she wouldn’t support a potential Trump run in 2024. Even with Trump actively in the public eye again—including his vowing this weekend to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he were to be elected president again—Collins said she doesn’t see a scenario in which the former president (who won nearly 47 percent of the popular vote in 2020) could win the party’s nomination. By downplaying Trump’s chances, her comments provided cover for her not saying explicitly that she wouldn’t back him. “Certainly, it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have that have expressed interest in running,” she said, regarding Trump’s chances of getting the nomination. In fact, recent polling suggests that Republicans overwhelmingly support Trump over other potential candidates, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

As for Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, Collins feels that “the way that the president has handled this nomination has been clumsy at best.”

“It adds to the further perception that the court is a political institution like Congress, when it is not supposed to be,” she told Stephanopoulos. Never mind that the Supreme Court has been perceived increasingly as a partisan institution ever since Mitch McConnell brazenly blocked the confirmation process for Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and then pushed through three right-wing justices on behalf of Trump. Collins’ position is sure to enrage Democrats further, especially as an aging, narrowly divided Senate includes at least one senior Democratic senator who shares Collins’ attitude on confirming a Biden nominee: What’s the rush?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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