Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) speaks on the Senate floor on Friday about her vote in support of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. (Senate TV/AP)
After Sen. Susan Collins announced on the Senate floor Friday that she would cast her deciding vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) rose to liken her to another Republican from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, “the first member of the United States Senate to take on Joseph McCarthy . . . this demagogue and the tactics that he employed.”
If the Republican leader was too subtle, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), speaking next, left no doubt: “This is as close to McCarthyism as I hope we get in my lifetime,” Graham said of the Democrats, whom he accused of “mob rule.”
It was an insult to the memory of Margaret Chase Smith, whose heroic and patriotic 1950 speech, a “Declaration of Conscience,” was a lonely denunciation of the demagogue who dominated her Republican Party. Collins’s speech, ignoring the new demagoguery that has overtaken her party while criticizing the other side, was the very opposite. Hers was a Declaration of Convenience, a Declaration of Capitulation.
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