In separate interviews, Collins and Murkowski said constituents view the health-care debate and the Supreme Court very differently. “The protests are similar, the media campaign is more aggressive this time, but the constituent involvement is less. And I think that’s because health care is so personal and affects everybody,” Collins said.
“A different level of intensity, a different level of intensity. What I was hearing at home were very personal stories,” Murkowski recalled of last summer’s interactions with constituents. “Literally people in tears. The level of just emotional outpouring that made it just — intense is the best word — is different than it is now.”
[...] Those stories felt real and organic to the two senators, not part of a protest backed by a group from Washington issuing talking points for supporters to shout at the senators. Sometimes, it was a mother talking about how the ACA’s requirement of insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions meant that her son could get affordable care. Other times, a wife explained that the law’s Medicaid expansion meant her husband’s heart disease would be properly treated.
These were life-or-death moments. Did they impact how the senators voted? “How could they not?” Murkowski asked.
-‘A different level of intensity’: Collins and Murkowski find pressure over Supreme Court lacks emotional pleas on health care, Wapo, 7/28/18
murkowski and collins are preparing to justify their votes to confirm kavanaugh on the grounds that their constituents failed to prostrate themselves with sufficient terror and grief. the implied representative/constituent relationship here rests on the logic of king lear, who disowns his only faithful daughter (and thus destroys his kingdom) when she doesn’t make a public spectacle of her devotion. we are required to earn our own survival by engaging in performative suffering. it gets weirder the more you think about it.
