Susan Collins, Abortion-Rights Champion, Breaks a Tie to Seat an Abortion Foe

Susan Collins has built a thirty-year career on a single, carefully tended fiction: that she is the reasonable Republican, the firewall for reproductive rights, the woman who will break with her party when it counts. Watch what she does when the vote is close and nobody is supposed to be looking.

On Monday, September 15, the Senate deadlocked over ending debate on Matthew Byrne, Trump's pick for the federal bench in southern Ohio. Collins broke it. (cite index="1">The Senate advanced the nomination by a vote of 47 to 46, with Maine Senator Susan Collins casting the tie-breaking vote. Then she came back Tuesday and voted to confirm him outright.

Who is Byrne? A longtime Federalist Society man with a resume that reads like an audition for the Handmaid's ball. (cite index="1">He is affiliated with anti-abortion groups including Ohio Right to Life, Cincinnati Right to Life, Warren County Right to Life, and the Center for Christian Virtue, and in a 2020 judicial candidate survey he said he opposed abortion for any reason other than to protect the life of the mother, without any exceptions for rape or incest. In 2023, he was the lone Ohio Supreme Court judge who refused to toss a six-week ban even after voters wrote abortion rights into the state constitution. (cite index="1">He was the sole figure on the seven-judge court who refused to dismiss a case involving the legislature's six-week abortion ban after abortion was enshrined in the Ohio Constitution.

Here is the part Collins cannot spin. Maine's other senator, independent Angus King, voted no. (cite index="2">Maine's other senator, independent Angus King, voted against Byrne, as any senator from Maine should have. A lifetime appointment turned on Collins, and Collins alone. She could have killed it. She chose not to.

Then she did it again. Two days later she voted to confirm Kasdin Miller Mitchell, a Clarence Thomas clerk, to a Texas district court. (cite index="3">Collins voted for Kasdin Miller Mitchell, a former solicitor general of Alabama who served as a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, confirmed 49-45 to the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Two anti-abortion judges in one week, from the senator whose whole brand is that she is not that. Her opponent Troy Jackson called it what it is. (cite index="3">"Enough is enough," Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson declared after Collins voted once again for an anti-abortion judge despite her persistent claims that she supports reproductive rights.

The timing is not incidental. It is fatal. This is a woman who confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, promised us Roe was safe, watched it burn, and (cite index="4">said herself she still doesn't regret it. The receipts stretch back years. What is new is that Maine has stopped buying the act. (cite index="5">A CNN poll conducted August 31 to September 6 found Jackson leading Collins 48% to 45%, with Collins at 41% favorability and just over half of likely voters holding an unfavorable view of her.

And the money is a fire hose. (cite index="6">WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with Democrats, has booked roughly $29.4 million, part of $87.8 million in Democratic-aligned spending against nearly $133 million from Republican-aligned groups. Two hundred and twenty million dollars, give or take, to relitigate whether Susan Collins is who she says she is. She just answered that for free, in a 47 to 46 vote, six weeks out.

The moderate mask slips every time the tally gets tight. She is the deciding vote precisely when it matters most, and precisely when she bets you won't notice. MUCK YOU, Senator. We noticed.