Predictable: Susan Collins Will Vote for KBJ

CLAY: Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court nominee to replace Stephen Breyer, is going to be confirmed. That was a certainty as soon as Joe Manchin, Democratic senator from West Virginia, announced that he was going to be supporting her nomination. Then the question became: How many Republicans might be willing to vote for her?

Susan Collins, who voted for Brett Kavanaugh, really helped to get Brett Kavanaugh across the finish line so that he is on the Supreme Court, and then won an incredibly difficult reelection race that no one expected, by the way, her to win in the state of Maine, has become the first Republican to announce that she will be voting for Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Here is what Susan Collins just said in the last hour or so regarding that nomination.

CLAY: So, there is a Republican, Buck. You predicted three; I think I said Susan Collins to me was the most likely who potentially would flip. Mitt Romney, I would say, is the other one that is kind of there, and then there are other guys that are retiring that might decide to just go ahead and vote for her. There’s no expense here, really, but this will be treated as a major story.

BUCK: Yeah, I gotta say, I’m surprised at actually how much the Republican senators were willing to push, probe, ask real questions. It’s a rare moment, but, see, I admit when I didn’t get it exactly as it was. I had assumed they would go a little bit more gently on this nominee than they did. They pushed, and at least they created… Now, it doesn’t sway the outcome either way so it’s kind of easy to take a vote as a Republican.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: What’s the upside for most of the GOP senators of voting in favor of this nominee? There’s no upside. There’s only downside. Unless you’re Susan Collins, unless you’re a so-called moderate Republican who does not maybe seem up for a tough reelection fight, in which case you have to look at the political calculations involved here.

But the GOP did actually make it easier for those votes to be cast against this nominee insofar as they raised real questions about judgments and about credibility on certain issues when it comes to jurisprudence. Specifically on the child porn sentencing and a few other areas where they pressed this nominee pretty hard. I was surprised. I was surprised at it, quite honestly.

I thought it would be a little more like Amy Coney Barrett where you could tell the left wanted to land something, but they couldn’t really come up with it, and so they had to just sort of allow it to go through, the Democrat senators. This time around, the GOP, they put up something of a fight. You could say it was all for show, but they put up something of a fight.