Susan Collins, the moderate US senator from Maine whose vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the supreme court was decisive, despite sexual assault allegations, defended herself on Sunday against charges of betraying women and the #MeToo movement – as the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, boasted that the bitter fight on Capitol Hill has given his party a late advantage in the forthcoming midterm elections.
A day after Justice Kavanaugh, as he is now titled, was granted the ninth seat on the nation’s highest court, in the face of fierce protests, Collins was asked by Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union whether she had betrayed women. The Republican senator replied: “This is a case where there was an incident that happened allegedly 36 years ago where there is no corroborating evidence.”
She went on: “It is not fair to Brett Kavanaugh for this to be disqualifying in the absence of evidence, but that does not mean that I don’t believe Christine Ford was a victim of sexual assault.”
Collins then put further space between herself and Ford, the California-based professor who accused Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a teenaged gathering in Maryland in the early 1980s. She said that she found Ford’s testimony before the Senate judiciary committee “heartwrenching, painful, compelling” but she went on to say: “I believe that she believes what she testified to.”
But Democratic Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono shot back at Collins’s phrase, asking: “What is that?” on CNN, and calling it insulting to Ford.
With the dust barely settling after a process that was meant to uphold the sanctity and august bearing of the supreme court but ended up being one of the most partisan, and narrowly won, confirmation proceedings in history, brickbats continued to fly over the weekend. Thousands of women and men rallied outside the court on Saturday in protest.
