This holier-than-thou Republican is forgetting her own dark past

The Candidate With Scandal and the Senator With PowerPower Is Not SymmetryThis story is not about two equally damaged politicians. It is about a sitting senator with institutional power trying to posture as a moral referee while a challenger absorbs the blast radius of his own alleged misconduct. That difference matters. Susan Collins is not a random commentator. She is the incumbent senator, the official who helped shape the country’s abortion landscape by voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Graham Platner is a candidate under scrutiny for allegations of intimidation and abuse. One has public power. The other is trying to win it.The weak framing in this kind of coverage is pretending those roles sit on the same plane. They do not. Accountability is not distributed evenly when one person helped produce the harm and the other is simply a figure in an ugly race.Platner’s Conduct Is Real, and Still Not the Whole StoryThe source centers allegations that Platner frightened and abused women, and that is not a trivial campaign problem. If those accounts are true, they describe deliberate harm, not a bad-news cycle or a political stumble. His apologies cannot erase that. His party has every reason to scrutinize him hard.But the article’s central mistake would be to let Platner’s scandal become a cover for the larger machinery around Collins. That is how political coverage launders institutional responsibility: it treats the newest, loudest allegation as the main event and the older, more consequential act of power as background noise.Collins Built the ConsequenceCollins does not get to adopt the costume of the appalled bystander. She was warned. Women in Maine protested and told her what the Kavanaugh confirmation meant. She called Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony “heart-wrenching, painful, and compelling,” then voted to confirm Kavanaugh anyway after choosing to trust his assurances that he would not help overturn Roe v. Wade.That vote mattered because Kavanaugh was not some abstract jurist in a neutral robe. He became part of the Court that overturned Roe. The consequences the source names are concrete: abortion access restricted, miscarriage care denied, nonviable pregnancies forced to continue, legal uncertainty deepening during medical emergencies. Collins did not merely misread a person. She helped deliver a result that stripped people of choices and imposed harm at scale.That is not confusion. That is a decision with predictable victims.Accountability as Political CostumeCollins now wants to speak the language of outrage because outrage is useful when aimed downward. It is easy to condemn a challenger’s alleged abuse. It is harder to face one’s own record when that record comes wrapped in Senate office, judicial confirmation, and the power to shape national law.This is where the article’s premise gets slippery: it correctly notes that Collins asks Platner to answer for alleged harm, then treats her own vote as if it belongs to a separate category of responsibility. It does not. She had access to the same warnings everyone else had. She heard from women, saw the protests, and still chose the outcome that helped create today’s abortion regime. She has never really owned that choice. She still says she stands by it.That is institutional cowardice dressed up as prudence.The Real Lesson in MaineThe deeper pattern here is not just hypocrisy. It is the familiar political split between visible personal misconduct and sanctioned institutional violence. Campaigns can survive scandal if they control the narrative. Institutions can survive much worse if their defenders keep calling harm a matter of judgment or uncertainty.Platner’s alleged conduct is being judged because it is personal, immediate, and politically useful to condemn. Collins’ conduct is harder to pin to a headline because it arrived through procedure, confirmation votes, and legal doctrine. But the latter changed millions of lives. That is the larger crime of elite politics: it teaches voters to focus on the man caught in the scandal while excusing the official who helped engineer the damage and now asks to be applauded for restraint.The system rewards the actor who inflicts harm through institutions and punishes the one whose damage is easier to narrate. That is not accountability. That is power choosing which injuries count. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe