More from Dionne on Collins and Kavanaugh, last night at WaPo but also here with no subscription wall issues:

https://www.arcamax.com/politics/fromtheleft/ejdionnejr/s-2123999

I was a bit gobsmacked reading this part of his column:

Exceptional dangers require exceptional and sometimes unusual responses.

This was the spirit animating the volunteers at a phone bank here Tuesday night. They were asking citizens to urge their state’s popular Republican senator, Susan Collins, to oppose the confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And if they found a sympathizer, they took an additional and, for some, a controversial step: Asking for a commitment to contribute to a fund that would be activated against Collins (her term is up in 2020) if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

The campaign is spearheaded by Mainers for Accountable Leadership and Maine People’s Alliance, and it has outraged Collins, a consensus seeker who issued an unusually sharp retort: “Attempts at bribery or extortion will not influence my vote at all.”

The organizers were unapologetic. “The idea of Susan Collins attacking an effort by 35,000 small-dollar donors as bribery is politics at its worst,” Marie Follayttar Smith, the Accountable Leadership group’s co-director, said in a statement. “We absolutely have the right to prepare to unseat her given everything Judge Kavanaugh would do on the Supreme Court to make life worse for Maine women.”

For those who might be understandably troubled about money’s electoral power being wielded so openly, there is this irony: Kavanaugh himself is, as the legal scholar Richard Hasen wrote recently in Slate, “deeply skeptical of even the most basic campaign-finance limits.”

Seriously?  This is what "outrages" her?  It's ok when one side does this, but not the other?  

She has a fateful vote to cast.  Either way she goes she is going to have a tough re-nomination (if she votes no she'll be challenged in the primary, for sure, by a heavily financed opponent) or re-election fight in 2020.  If she decides to run again.