Good on Susan Collins for Doing the Bare Minimum

Her announcement today likely ensures that Ketanji Brown Jackson will be confirmed with bipartisan support.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden's nominee for Associate Justice to the Supreme Court, meets with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in her office on Tuesday, March 8, 2022.Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA

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Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) announced today that she’ll vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first Republican to do so and securing a victory for Joe Biden, who can now brag that his court pick garnered support from across the aisle. 

Collins’s statement, along with a similar commitment from Sen. Joe Manchin, all but guarantees that Jackson will ascend to the court and likely means that Vice President Kamala Harris will not have to cast a tie-breaking vote. 

The Democrats have been trying to get a Republican in their corner to create the appearance of a bipartisan confirmation for awhile, with a particular eye to Collins and her fellow moderates Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney. Along with Lindsay Graham (now a probable no-vote), Murkowski and Collins were the only Republicans to support Jackson’s appointment to the appeals court, and Romney has signaled that he’ll keep an open mind about her nomination. 

In an interview with the New York Times explaining her decision, Collins bemoaned the way that the confirmation process has become politicized. 

“In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee,” she said. “It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”

The statement was in line with Collins’ broader efforts to cast herself as one of the “reasonable” conservatives. Over her quarter-century tenure in the Senate, she has tried to cultivate a brand as a Republican moderate coasting above petty partisan divides and willing to buck her party’s consensus. On certain issues, she has, in fact, gone against the GOP grain—voting to convict Donald Trump following his second impeachment, pushing for a doomed independent commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, and opposing the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. But in 2018, she traumatized Democrats by casting a crucial vote in support of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (albeit only after a great deal of handwringing to let everybody know that it was a tough decision). At the time, Collins, rather credulously, scoffed at warnings that Kavanaugh would help roll back reproductive rightsa possibility that now seems quite likely.

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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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