Anti Susan Collins Crowdfunding Site Raises $2 Million

An effort to replace Susan Collins in the U.S. Senate has already raised more than $2 million and that was before the Maine Republican announced that she was voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Just minutes after Collins’s announcement that she is voting yes on Kavanaugh, the Crowdpac site to donate to the effort appeared to have crashed, perhaps from volume of interest.Kavanaugh was confirmed with a vote of 50-48-1. Collins did vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

The crowdfunding effort was organized by a man named Ady Barkan. The site announces, “Tell Senator Susan Collins to #BeAHero. Vote NO on Kavanaugh. If she votes for him, your money will go to fund her future opponent.” According to Vox, the crowdfunding campaign was “launched by ALS patient and activist Ady Barkan, the grassroots community action organization Maine People’s Alliance, and the activist and watchdog group Mainers for Accountable Leadership.”

Barkan revealed that the CrowdPac site had crashed and offered people another option.

He was urging people to pledge $20.20.

President Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has already indicated she wants to run against Collins, although she later added, “many thanks for the encourgement (sic). I’m not making any announcements. Like so many Americans, I am deeply disappointed in Senator Collins’ vote for Kavanaugh. Maine and America deserve better.”

In a lengthy speech, Collins said she simply did not see enough corroboration to vote no against Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, who has been accused of sexual assault charges he denies.

In her speech, Susan Collins decried a confirmation process that she said was “dysfunctional” and “looks more like a caricature of a gutter level political campaign.”

She added that she believes “Judge Kavanaugh is more of a centrist than some of his critics maintain…Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence and fairness, do bear on my thinking, and I can not abandon them. We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. When passions are most inflamed, fairness is most in jeopardy.”

Collins said she found Kavanaugh’s accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford “sincere, painful and compelling. I believe she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred. None of the individuals Professor Ford says were at the party has any recollection at all of that night. Judge Kavanaugh forcefully denied the allegations.”

Collins then named the other people Ford said were at the party who said they had no recollection of it: Mark Judge, PJ Smyth, and Ford’s own friend, Leland Keyser.

“Not a single person has contacted her to say I was at the party that night…not a single person has come forward to say they were the one who drove her home or were in the car with her that night,” said Collins. You can read her statement in full here.

“The allegations failed to meet the more likely than not standard,” concluded Collins, then revealing she will vote yes. Her vote, along with the announced yes votes of Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Jeff Flake, will be enough to confirm Kavanaugh providing nothing changes in the next 24 hours.

Kavanaugh opponents on social media expressed anger at Collins, whereas Kavanaugh supporters praised her. A sampling: