As Susan Collins prepared to announce how she'd vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, there was a genuine sense of curiosity about what she'd do. Her choice was likely to clinch or doom the nomination, and she'd given few indicators either way. But when a group of protestors chanting, “Show up for Maine women, vote no” confronted her as she stepped to the podium, Collins had no visible reaction. For her, the brief interruption was simply that. In the 45 minutes that followed, she made clear that she had no interest in listening to Maine women, or to anyone else who objected to Brett Kavanaugh—and that she never did.

On the Senate floor, Collins made two main assertions to back up her “yes” vote: She promised that she had done her homework on Kavanaugh’s judicial record and claimed to have carefully reviewed Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony as well as the ensuing FBI report. Both points were attempts at showing her thoroughness, which is a thing that Very Serious Politicians with quasi-moderate reputations use to differentiate themselves from the knee-jerk decisions made by supposedly more partisan peers. She said she doesn’t believe Kavanaugh would be influenced by the fact that President Trump gave him the job, or that he would work with the other four conservative judges to restrict access to birth control or overturn Roe v. Wade. There is little evidence for any of these claims. There are plenty of reasons to doubt them.

While Collins believes that Ford is “a survivor of a sexual assault," she says, she does not believe Kavanaugh was her assailant. (She has offered no alternative theory for these seemingly contradictory positions; perhaps she subscribes to the libelous Ed Whelan tweet-thread theory.) On Sunday, Collins said that she hopes this controversy prompts more women to report their assaults when they occur—a tacit criticism of Ford, even though her assault occurred in an era when victims of sexual assault were (somehow) taken even less seriously than they are today. Collins also made note of the American Bar Association’s “well-qualified” rating for Kavanaugh, which is a curious citation given that the ABA is now reconsidering its rating based on “new information of a material nature regarding temperament.”

Collins’s wholehearted embrace of these vapid GOP talking points is emblematic of her entire justification for supporting Kavanaugh, which basically consisted of her closing her eyes and plugging her ears to information that would prove inconvenient to the creation of a conservative Supreme Court majority. The “process has finally hit rock bottom,” she said. That—not Kavanaugh’s lies, or his troubling judicial record, or Ford’s credible testimony about what he did to her—was what Collins felt the need to lecture Americans about.

Her choice is so disappointing because her Republican colleagues—the McConnells and Grassleys and Grahams of the world, who long ago turned into cartoonish, misogynist supervillains—are honest about who they are and what they want. Collins, who helped save the Affordable Care Act, and sometimes tut-tuts about President Trump, and has proven herself capable of abandoning the stock GOP position, is not. Like Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and Joe Manchin, she cares far more about appearing moderate and independent than doing things that a moderate, independent legislator would do.

Her constituents in Maine have taken notice, raising some four million dollars for her eventual 2020 opponent. And why wouldn't they? Collins broke her promise to be an independent voice in Washington, all the while insisting that she had delivered on it.