Democratic Senators Help Confirm Election Denier to Trump’s Cabinet
Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to confirm Doug Collins as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, as 24 Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for the nomination in a 77-23 vote.
Collins is not just any nominee. As an outgoing Republican member of Congress in 2020, he signed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That case fizzled out at the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled Texas lacked standing to challenge the results in other states.
Every Democrat currently in the Senate has made strong, if not righteously indignant statements speaking out against election denialism, as well as the attempts by President Donald Trump and his allies to subvert the results of the 2020 election, which he lost but falsely claims was stolen from him. Given Trump’s continued influence over the GOP, this bogus allegation of voter fraud has become canon within the party. Including Collins, 126 House Republicans in 2020 signed on to the aforementioned amicus brief in support of undoing an election whose result they did not like.
And yet, two dozen Democrats voted to usher through Collins’ nomination to Trump’s cabinet:
Michael Bennet (CO)
Richard Blumenthal (CT)
Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)
Dick Durbin (IL)
John Fetterman (PA)
Ruben Gallego (AZ)
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY)
Maggie Hassan (NH)
Martin Heinrich (NM)
John Hickenlooper (CO)
Tim Kaine (VA)
Mark Kelly (AZ)
Angus King (ME, Independent, caucuses with the Democrats)
Amy Klobuchar (MN)
Ben Ray Luján (NM)
Jon Ossoff (GA)
Gary Peters (MI)
Jacky Rosen (NV)
Bernie Sanders (VT, caucuses with the Democrats)
Adam Schiff (CA)
Jeanne Shaheen (NH)
Elissa Slotkin (MI)
Raphael Warnock (GA)
Peter Welch (VT)
Last week, even more Democrats voted to invoke cloture to end debate on Collins’ nomination, as 31 out of 47 voted to advance his nomination.
Collins has also been something of a political bomb-thrower. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, Collins tweeted, “RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended pro-abortion laws. With @realDonaldTrump nominating a replacement that values human life, generations of unborn children have a chance to live.”
