Senator Susan Collins from Maine. (Al-Drago / Getty Photographs)
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Maine Senator Susan Collins gained’t say whether or not she’s going to vote for Donald Trump on November 3. However she votes for him when it counts: on the ground of Senate and within the court docket of public opinion.
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For Collins or her champions to recommend in any other case—because the senator seeks a fifth time period this fall—is a lie each bit as outrageous as these advised by the president she has so loyally and successfully served.
Collins, who has for a quarter-century positioned herself as an independent-minded Republican with a reasonable streak, has, for the reason that 45th president assumed workplace in 2017, made herself his important ally within the Senate. To a far better extent than Senator majority chief Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, or Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, it’s Collins who has risked her status and her political place to guard and serve Trump. Whereas McConnell may be extra decided in his manipulation of the chamber on the president’s behalf, and whereas Graham may be extra cynical in his defenses of the person he as soon as decried as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” it’s Collins who has supplied the high-profile help that the president wanted at each crucial juncture in his presidency.
Earlier than the 2016 election, Collins introduced that she had reached “the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Trump lacks the temperament, self-discipline and judgment required to be president” as a result of the Republican nominee “opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities.” But, even earlier than Trump took workplace in January 20, 2017, the senior senator from Maine was main the cost on behalf of a few of the new president’s most controversial cupboard picks; Collins really appeared earlier than the Senate Judiciary Committee to guarantee committee members that legal professional normal–nominee Jeff Periods—a xenophobic zealot with a monitor file of mounting racist assaults on voting rights—wasn’t that dangerous a man. When Trump’s second Supreme Court docket nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, confronted fees of sexual assault and mendacity to the Senate, Collins rallied to Kavanaugh’s protection and tipped the steadiness in favor of the president’s choose. And when Trump confronted a damning set of impeachment fees, Collins voted to acquit him—declaring that the president had “learned a ‘pretty big lesson’ from the impeachment process and would be “much more cautious in the future.”
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Collins broke with Trump on some points. As an example, she and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski opposed the nomination of the president’s most woefully unqualified cupboard alternative, Betsy DeVos, to function secretary of training. However DeVos was going to be confirmed even with out her—and Collins knew that.
When it has mattered, the Maine senator has voted together with her occasion’s president—sustaining a 94 p.c file of voting with Trump that’s much more constant than that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
Now, nonetheless, Collins gained’t say whether or not she’s going to vote for Trump in November. When the difficulty got here up in final week’s Maine Senate debate, Collins dodged it with the glibness of the profession politician that she is: “Let me say this: I don’t think the people of Maine need my advice on whom to support for president.” Present Problem
In a state that polls recommend will vote for Democrat Joe Biden over Trump, Collins didn’t wish to offend Biden voters. However she additionally didn’t wish to do something to disappoint the president’s Republican base. Her Democratic rival, Sara Gideon, who serves because the speaker of Maine’s state Home of Representatives, has been open and trustworthy with voters, making it clear that she would have voted in opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination and in favor of eradicating the president—and that she’s going to vote for Biden in November. However Collins is making an attempt to have it each methods—as she did through the Kavanaugh hearings when she performed like she won’t vote to verify Trump’s choose.
Collins’s obfuscation is, in lots of senses, extra shameful than her voting file. The senator is a charlatan who thinks she will idiot the voters of Maine yet another time with a pretend-moderate act that has worn skinny. She’s trailing within the polls and she or he is aware of her solely hope for sustaining her sinecure within the Senate is to fake to be somebody she shouldn’t be. It’s so dangerous that in August, after Collins appeared at a Republican gathering in Springvale, Me., the senator’s marketing campaign was accused of posting social media photographs that slyly left Trump indicators out of the image.
However Collins has an issue in the case of sustaining her supposedly unbiased picture. Her personal occasion is off message. Final month, Maine Republican Get together chair Demi Kouzounas was requested throughout a “Trump Victory” name with occasion loyalists to elucidate why the embattled senator was not attending the Republican Nationwide Conference. “They’re not mutually exclusive. I think they both have their jobs to do,” defined Kouzounas. “They both support each other.”
That was damning. However not as damning as what Collins aide Carol Woodcock stated in February, when she addressed Maine Republicans in Washington County.
“Senator Collins is committed to keeping this seat Republican,” stated Woodcock, who urged the gang to not take severely tv advertisements criticizing the incumbent. “As Republicans, we need to ask ourselves: ‘Why are they spending so much money to defeat her?’ The answer is quite simple: They want the Democrats to take control of the Senate. But they can’t take control of the Senate as long as Senator Collins wins. I can assure you that there’s two people who want you to vote for Senator Collins. One is the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and two is our president, President Trump.”
That’s no exaggeration. Trump doesn’t care if Collins says she’s going to vote for him in November. He is aware of that Susan Collins has given him the votes that he wants.
