On an October afternoon in 2018, Susan Collins stood on the Senate floor and talked for the better part of an hour. Most of the chamber's votes were already predictable. Hers was the one nobody could bank on, and she used the time to walk through Brett Kavanaugh's record on precedent, his assurances to her in private, and her reading of the evidence against him. Then she said yes. Four years later, Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs, and Roe was gone. Now, in 2026, Collins is asking Maine for another term, and that speech follows her from town hall to campaign ad like a relative who retells the same story at every holiday. The question worth asking is how a moderate senator ended up holding the bet at all.
Most of the current noise is about whether Collins was fooled. Her critics say she should have known, and she has said Kavanaugh misled her, an argument that can run forever because nobody outside her office can see what was said inside it. The signal sits in the months before her speech. Justice Kennedy announced his retirement in late June. The White House chose a nominee it believed could clear the Senate, and then an allegation of sexual assault turned the hearings into a referendum on credibility. Each step narrowed the choices available to the handful of senators in the middle. By the time Collins spoke, the question in front of her had been framed by people with far clearer goals than hers. If you want to judge the vote fairly, you need that sequence, and the campaign coverage mostly skips it.
The story in Justice on Trial begins on June 27, 2018, when Anthony Kennedy quietly told President Trump he was retiring. Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino build outward from that private moment, drawing on interviews with more than one hundred participants, including presidents, justices, and senators. The access shows. The early chapters move like a political procedural, with a White House that had been preparing for this vacancy and a Senate calendar that suddenly held one fight. From there the book follows the timeline you half remember: the nomination strategy, the combative questioning, and the allegations from Christine Blasey Ford that nearly ended the nomination.
Then comes Kavanaugh's impassioned defense and the recovery of his support. The authors reconstruct who was calling whom and when, and the result treats a confirmation fight as a chain of decisions made by specific people in specific rooms, which is how it should be told and rarely is. You should know who is telling the story. Severino ran a conservative legal group that campaigned hard for the confirmation, and Hemingway is a conservative journalist. The book's own framing calls the allegations unverified accusations used as instruments in a campaign of personal destruction. That is a verdict, and the book argues toward it from the first chapter without ever putting it at risk.
If you want the other side of the ledger, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, reports the same months from the opposite starting assumption. The two books disagree about almost everything except the dates. Because the authors write from inside the coalition that won, they are candid about why the fight was so fierce. Kennedy had long been the swing vote on abortion, and replacing him was the prize. That candor sits awkwardly beside the assurances about settled precedent that persuaded wavering senators. Without meaning to, the book builds a strong case against the reasoning behind Collins's vote, because it shows how plainly the stakes were understood by the people who wanted the seat.
Its limit is time. The book was written in the aftermath of 2018, years before Dobbs, so it cannot tell you what the confirmation produced. That judgment belongs to you, with this account as the inside record of how the vote was assembled.
Justice on Trial will not settle whether Susan Collins was misled, and it is too invested in its own conclusions to be the last word on 2018. What it gives you is a detailed inside account of how a Supreme Court seat was won, told by people who wanted it won. If you want to understand why one vote from eight years ago is shaping a Senate race now, that account is worth your time, ideally alongside a book that disagrees with it. Read together with the Maine campaign, it clarifies one thing plainly: the senator in the middle rarely sets the terms of the vote she casts, yet she is the one who answers for it on the trail years later.