Mike Collins spent part of Tuesday's debate telling Jon Ossoff what Ossoff secretly wants. Ossoff says he has "zero interest" in running for president in 2028. Collins insists he knows better. It's the oldest dodge in politics: when you can't win the argument about the job in front of you, litigate the candidate's imagined ambitions.
The tell is what it replaced. Ossoff pressed Collins on former staffers' reported ties to white nationalists. Collins denied holding those views and said he fired people when concerns arose. Maybe so. But the question was serious, and it came from a Georgia senator whose state has a long memory about who gets tolerated in public life. Voters are entitled to ask who a congressman hires, who he keeps around, and how long it takes him to notice. "He's secretly running for president" is not an answer to that.
Then came Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein. Collins can raise a donor's past meetings with a predator, and Hoffman's judgment deserves scrutiny. But Collins asks Georgians to take that seriously while belonging to a party led by a man who palled around with Epstein for years and whose administration has treated the demand for full disclosure as an annoyance. The Republican Party did not discover its outrage over Epstein's circle out of principle. It was dragged there. A donor's meetings are not a vote, a policy, or a deed done in office. Guilt by association is a weak weapon, and it is weaker in the hands of a man whose own party has so much to answer for.
The most revealing exchange was the quietest one: the law. Ossoff defended his vote to halt certain weapons shipments to Israel by saying U.S. arms transfers must comply with American and international law. That used to be a boring sentence. The Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act exist precisely so that no president, of either party, can hand weapons to anyone without conditions. Insisting those laws mean something is not radical. It is the job. Plenty of Democrats flinch from that argument because they fear the politics. Ossoff made it in a statewide race in Georgia, framed as legal obligation rather than slogan. That's the right way to hold the position, and a rebuke to colleagues who treat every question about accountability as a loyalty test.
He took the same posture on impeachment. Asked what he'd do if House articles against Trump reached the Senate, Ossoff said he'd evaluate them on the merits as a juror. Some on the left will wish he'd say more. I understand the itch. But look at the alternative on offer. Republican senators have shown they will declare a verdict before the evidence arrives. A senator who says he'll actually listen is practicing the minimum of what an oath requires. That this now sounds almost quaint tells you how far the other side has drifted.
Collins wants this race to be about Ossoff's ego, a rich donor's address book, and a hypothetical 2028. Ossoff wants it to be about whether the people holding power follow the rules, including the ones about weapons and the ones about who gets hired in your own office. Democrats should be glad to have that fight. The one who keeps changing the subject is usually the one who knows which subject he's losing.
