A new profile of Senator Susan Collins digs into Collins’ crumbling reputation, her inaccessibility to Mainers, and her support for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell when it matters most.

 

In an examination of Senator Collins’ voting record on Trump nominees from Betsy DeVos to federal judges, the profile illuminates that Collins is “only willing to go out on a limb when it’s easy to do so, not hard,” voting with her party 94 percent of the time when Republicans held a narrower majority in 2017 and 2018. And as she continues to attempt to walk back her claim that Trump learned a “pretty big lesson” from impeachment, “Collins either reveals herself to be a chump or her suspicion that voters are chumps.”

 

NY Mag (Intelligencer): The Immoderate Susan Collins

 

By Rebecca Traister

February 18, 2020

 

Key Points:

 

  • In 2015, polling firm Morning Consult found Collins to have, at 78 percent, the highest approval ratings of any Republican senator, second only to Bernie Sanders in the whole body. But this January, the same survey found her approval at 42 percent and her disapproval at 52; she is now the most unpopular American senator, beating out even her caucus leader, Mitch McConnell.

 

  • In 2017 and 2018, during the period of the Trump administration when Republicans had a narrow majority in the Senate and every vote counted, Collins voted with her party 94 percent of the time. Since the Republican majority has grown, she’s gone back to casting some (largely decorative) votes in opposition, some of which work mostly to alienate her from hard-core Trump voters and look to liberals like little more than a fig leaf.

 

  • In short, Collins has gone from pleasing an unusually high number of people, at least some of the time, to pleasing vanishingly few people almost never.

 

  • Trying to get Collins’s attention has become something of a weekend sport for some Mainers. As any one of her critics will quickly tell you, the senator has not held a town hall for more than 20 years.

 

  • Multiple organizations that had previously endorsed or supported Collins have turned on her for the first time: NARAL. The League of Conservation Voters. Planned Parenthood, which gave the officially pro-choice Republican an award as recently as 2017, in January endorsed her leading Democratic opponent,

 

  • That inaccessibility often backfires, leaving frustrated Mainers ready to pounce whenever and wherever they do see her — in stores and on airplanes — and Collins vulnerable to the kinds of impromptu encounters she seems to loathe and that tend to spiral even further out of her control.

 

  • In December, a video of another airplane interaction with the senator went briefly viral: In it, a woman asks Collins if she’ll return donations from Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical manufacturer widely blamed for inflating insulin prices, or from Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ Sackler family, which has been widely blamed for its role in the opioid crisis that has ravaged Maine. Collins tells the woman that she has “never” accepted donations from the Sacklers (she did in fact receive contributions from them in 2007, 2010, and 2011). Collins later admitted that she might have taken money from Lilly, but said she would not return it.

 

  • As a member of the Senate Education Committee, Collins could have voted to keep DeVos from moving to a floor vote, but she voted her out of committee. Yet once DeVos was in front of the whole Senate, and had enough votes to get through, Collins voted against her, an example of Collins not using her vote powerfully when she had the opportunity, a pattern even more evident when it comes to her votes on Trump’s judges.

 

  • When Republicans held a narrow majority in the Senate in the first two years of Trump’s term, Collins voted the party line. She was the crucial vote that confirmed Jonathan Kobes, who was declared underqualified by the American Bar Association and had served on the board of Bethany Christian Services, an agency that refused to place children with same-sex couples.

 

  • But since Republicans have increased their majority and gained more wiggle room, Collins has begun voting against some of Trump’s judicial appointments, citing, in several cases, anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ views that did not stop her vote when her party needed it. In all three cases, her party had the votes to confirm the judges without Collins. In other words, she’s only willing to go out on a limb when it’s easy to do so, not hard.

 

  • After all, even before Romney gave his speech, implicitly indicting the other moderates who had voted to shield the president from conviction, Trump himself had humiliated Collins and her stated belief that he had learned from his impeachment. Asked about her comments, he’d denied that he’d learned anything, forcing Collins to backtrack her already pathetic assertion by calling her belief in his chastisement “aspirational.”

 

  • By presenting markers that are so easily, observably blown through by her party, Collins either reveals herself to be a chump or her suspicion that voters are chumps.

 

  • Choosing between a party that now demands total fealty and a constituency she’s promised independence, Collins — a woman who has built her image around being a careful, thoughtful decision-maker — appears to have made no decision at all about the best way to keep her power. Instead, she is hoping that she can pretend to do both without anyone noticing. It might work. But if I were her, I’d be deeply concerned.

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