Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, had no comment after her fellow Republicans on a Senate panel voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the federal government’s COVID-19 pandemic czar, in contempt of Congress.

Meanwhile, Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, criticized the move and the panel’s meeting as “volatile and politically motivated.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which neither Collins nor King is a member of, voted 8-5 along party lines Thursday to hold Fauci in contempt. That came after he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination during a hearing last week, declining to answer questions about the pandemic and its origins.

Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee and who has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over the pandemic, told reporters after Thursday’s vote that he would immediately send the contempt resolution to the U.S. Department of Justice. Those types of resolutions would normally go to the Senate and need 60 votes to pass, but that’s unlikely to happen in the closely divided chamber. Republicans control it by a 53-47 margin.

Collins and her office had no comment Friday on the move to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, according to spokesperson Phoebe Keller.

King, the Maine independent who is not up for reelection this year, said in a statement Friday that Fauci “served the nation with distinction under seven Presidents — four Republicans and three Democrats — and mobilized scientific advancement to improve the health of the American people.”

King also noted Paul’s stated objective to “see Dr. Fauci behind bars.”

“I believe that a full and good-faith accounting of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a worthwhile exercise — to assess lessons learned for continued public health preparedness measures,” King said. “However, last week’s volatile and politically motivated hearing was not an appropriate forum nor a serious exercise in Congress’ role of oversight. Dr. Fauci was justified in his bid to stay silent — he was not willing to participate in a TV-motivated game of ‘gotcha’ aimed at enhancing a conspiratorial agenda.”

The Justice Department said after Thursday’s vote that it had received the contempt resolution, with a spokesperson saying the department is “reviewing it and will work with the Senate accordingly.” It is unclear what may happen next and whether any actions against Fauci would run into legal hurdles.

Democrats on the Senate committee tried unsuccessfully to table the resolution and criticized Paul’s move to send it directly to the Justice Department as unprecedented.

Collins is running for reelection against Democrat Troy Jackson this year. Declining to weigh in on a resolution that may never reach the full Senate means she may avoid alienating voters, including Republicans and independents who are critical of Fauci and Democrats who revere him. Collins had respectful interactions with the doctor during past hearings about the pandemic.

Fauci, 85, served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984-2022, becoming best known for leading the government’s COVID response when the deadly pandemic broke out in 2020. He was part of President Donald Trump’s effort to distribute the first COVID vaccines to Americans and then became former President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser until stepping down in 2022.

Biden pardoned Fauci before leaving office in 2025 to guard against what he viewed as potential “revenge” during Trump’s second term.

Conservative critics have bashed Fauci repeatedly over the years and blamed him for COVID response measures they viewed as too restrictive to businesses, schools and other areas of public life. Trump suggested Thursday that Fauci should be prosecuted, hours after Paul said he was asking the Justice Department to do that.

Paul argued Fauci could not plead the Fifth Amendment given that Biden preemptively pardoned him. David Schertler, Fauci’s lawyer, called Thursday’s vote “a crude political stunt intended to punish Dr. Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights.”

Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify last week and had released a vast number of pages of Fauci’s private diary entries about his daily life between December 2019 and December 2022. Paul has accused Fauci of covering up the origins of the virus, and he homed in on a past entry in which Fauci wrote that he is “almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though … I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak.”

Years of debate have revolved around the pandemic’s origins, and whether the coronavirus emerged accidentally or intentionally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is a Chinese laboratory that has studied bat coronaviruses and is located in the city where the first cases of COVID were recorded.