Susan Collins spent 2018 explaining, at some length, why she trusted Brett Kavanaugh’s assurances that Roe was “settled law” — precedent on precedent, the kind of thing you don’t just knock over. She was effectively the deciding vote, and she made a show of doing her homework: private meetings, a careful floor speech, the whole ritual of due diligence before a vote that mattered. Then Dobbs happened, and “settled” turned out to mean settled until it didn’t, which is not really what the word promises.

Eight years later she’s running for reelection in Maine, against a Democratic field that spent this summer reorganizing itself around her — first Platner, then chaos, now Troy Jackson — and the single most durable issue against her is a vote she can defend perfectly on the facts and still can’t escape on the outcome. She read the room correctly in 2018. The problem is the room changed years later, and someone still has to answer for the room she voted for.

This is the shape a lot of consequential votes take: the risk was real but invisible at the time, priced against a probability nobody had right, and by the time it resolves, the person who cast the vote is the only name left at the table. Kavanaugh isn’t on a ballot this year. Collins is. Not exactly unfair — she did cast it — but a strange kind of accountability, the kind that lands on whoever stuck around long enough to still be there when the bill comes due.

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