Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, gets into a Capitol Police vehicle as she departs after speaking on the Senate floor, on Capitol Hill, Friday, Oct. 5, 2018 in Washington about her vote on Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The Democrats and their choleric supporters, overwhelmed by anger and bile, may not realize it yet (or possibly ever) but Susan Collins saved the Senate, at least for now, with her superb, well-reasoned speech explaining her support for Brett Kavanaugh Friday.
Prior to her words, a good portion of the public could only nod their heads at Senator John Kennedy's description of the Kavanaugh confirmation process as "an intergalactic freak show." That apt characterization could not help but carry over to the Senate in general, an entity -- it's hard to believe now -- that was once called "the world's greatest deliberative body."
Nevertheless, Collins treated these children like adults and delivered a logical point-by-point analysis of why Kavanaugh should be confirmed. She even threw a generous bouquet to Judiciary Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein, saying she was sure the California senator was not responsible for the leak of Dr. Ford's letter that ignited the freak show.
I'm not sure Collins completely believed that. Who could when Feinstein has behaved throughout the process like the ultimate partisan hack -- and an unfettered one at that? Besides palming the accusation until the last possible moment in a totally despicable manner, it was Dianne who was the first to raise in cross-examination the most scurrilous and patently absurd of the several uncorroborated charges -- that high school boy Kavanaugh had participated in serial gang rapes on ten occasions. As Joseph Welch might have said to Feinstein, "Have you no shame, ma'am?"
But still I (reluctantly) applaud Collins' strategy in exonerating Feinstein while pointing the blame for the leak at a mysterious culprit no one will probably ever find. After all, it is Susan who has to live side-by-side with the execrable Dianne in that chamber (I meant to add "of horrors," but I won't).
Collins' more important goal was to right the ship, which she did admirably. She pointed out what most honest and intelligent people realized all along -- that Kavanaugh (a proven believer in stare decisis) is highly unlikely to roll back Roe v. Wade and even less likely to do anything to undermine Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry under the 14th Amendment.
This seems to have made little impact on the Democrats, at least on the surface. They declined to applaud Collins after a more impressive speech than any single one of them, to my knowledge, has ever given. I guess they couldn't abide what she was saying toward the end, that she hoped that this hideous period of treating the rule of law like garbage was over and that Congress and the Court could learn to work together for the good of the country.
Out on the street and in the corridors of the Capitol Building, the rabble, although more easily excused, was even worse, almost incapable of rational thought. An extremely black comic tweet says it all.
Elsewhere they were listening to Linda Sarsour, a woman who espouses misogynistic and homophobic Sharia law and has herself been accused of battering. The left in our country has gone mad, as if they were a collective of lobotomized lemmings. Let's hope they don't take us all over the cliff with them. Or get somebody or somebodies killed.
But for now we have a reprieve in the fine speech of Susan Collins and the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh.
We should all pray for his wife and daughters that they should get over a trauma that was viciously and thoughtlessly imposed upon them.
Roger L. Simon - co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media - is a novelist and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.
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