Collins votes against her party “only after it has become apparent that the damage won’t be massive”

Augusta, Maine – In case you missed it, new reporting from the Bulwark is highlighting how “when it comes to important Republican policies being codified or nominations to key positions getting a green light in the Senate, Collins is a regular deciding vote.”

The reporting goes on to describe just how calculated Collins rare “no” votes are, highlighting the hypocrisy of her reasoning and going on to describe “Collins doesn’t want to shoulder too much of the credit or the blame.”

Read more:

The Bulwark: Susan Collins, Political Weathervane
By Joe Perticone
August 5, 2025

  • “Susan Collins is always there when we need her,” Republican activist Charlie Kirk crowed after the Maine Republican voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence in February.

  • When it comes to important Republican policies being codified or nominations to key positions getting a green light in the Senate, Collins is a regular deciding vote. But it’s not always easy to anticipate how she’ll decide to vote.

  • Since the start of the second Trump presidency, Collins’s voting behavior has been confounding. For starters, consider her record on Trump administration nominees. In the “yea” column, you will find her votes to confirm anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary, white nationalist-linked Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Pam Bondi as attorney general, and Gabbard as DNI.

  • So far, so MAGA.

  • The problem for the Collins predictors is that her reasons for voting against certain nominees could easily apply to the ones whom she supported. It’s easy to understand why she would require a nominee to an important Justice Department position to be “decidedly apolitical”—the standard to which she held Patel—but then, why does she not take that standard to apply to the attorney general overseeing Patel and D.C.’s U.S. attorney?

  • It makes sense that a “lack of experience” was enough for her to oppose Hegseth. But why does that stated reason not apply to America’s top health care position (RFK Jr. quite literally revealed in his confirmation that he had no clue how Medicaid worked), or pivotal intelligence community posts?

  • What becomes clear when you look at the tallies for each of these confirmation votes is that Collins doesn’t want to shoulder too much of the credit or the blame.

  • Back when Collins served alongside former Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the wisdom inside the Capitol was that Collins always waited to see which way her colleague would vote first before going in the same direction.

  • Snowe left office in 2013. And now Collins routinely takes a contrarian view from her party only after it has become apparent that the damage won’t be massive.

  • That pattern extends beyond confirmation votes on nominees.

  • [...] I think it’s reasonable to imagine she would have found a way to vote in favor of the bill instead [if her nay would have tanked the entire enterprise]. For the motivated reasoner, reasons are never hard to find.

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