Senator Susan Collins is a partisan Donald Trump loyalist who accepted huge amounts of GOP political money to support the Trumpian evil agenda

Susan Collins Delivered Maine Up to Trump

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Cottle

“I deliver for the state of Maine.” 🙄🤥💥

(Maine Writer:  Senator Susan Collins needs to know what our first heating oil bill is for the upcoming winter.  $598.96 including a 1% veterans discount. This oil tank will have to be refilled in December.  Maine people cannot afford this high cost to stay warm with heating oil. People will die. They will suffer frostbite, hypothermia, even freeze to death because Senator Collins voted to support the One Big Beautiful - Ugly- Bill, many lost access to health insurance and Medicaid.  But, in the political ads, we are supposed to say, "Thank you Senator Collins"❓  For what❓ )

These seven words, uttered by Senator Susan Collins in a recent sit-down with Politico, are the heart of her re-election pitch this election. Every election, really.

The sole Republican senator still hanging on in a blue state, Collins, running for her sixth term, has for decades defied political gravity by selling herself as a moderate, independent, bipartisan pragmatist focused on getting stuff done for Mainers — a voice of political sanity amid the growing din of polarization and dysfunction. It is an above-the-fray appeal that feels designed to flatter voters as much as herself.

But here’s the thing. However moderate or pragmatic or pleasant she may be, Collins has a limited ability to influence what happens in today’s Senate, a starkly polarized chamber dominated by leadership and currently functioning mostly as a rubber stamp for an authoritarian president. Too often she is left scrambling to do damage control in response to the chaos created by her own party. In this environment, her national-vibes-versus-local-results construct is, at best, outmoded. These days, Collins is not delivering for Maine so much as she is delivering up Maine to the Trump agenda.

Serving in the Senate is a team sport, now more than ever. Party leaders keep a tight grip on how the chamber functions, what legislation proceeds and how key pools of campaign cash get distributed among members. (Maine Writer:  In other words, politics has become obsessed like never before with money.)

Ideological heterodoxy (definition: any opinion, belief or practice that strays from official, traditional or accepted standards) is frowned upon. Cross-aisle cooperation is discouraged. As rank-and-file senators will grumpily tell you, gone are the days when iconoclasts and independent thinkers held serious sway. The chamber is increasingly dominated by a “maximalist partisan position,” as Senator Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, put it to me last year.  Inside this polarized Thunderdome, Collins’s chief influence is as one more warm body giving her team the majority, and by extension the team leadership control over the agenda.

Also, respecting norms does not automatically make for moderate, sensible outcomes. Collins has cast some of her more upsetting votes in recent years under this banner. Her belief in granting as much deference as possible to presidential nominees, for instance, led her to support the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of health and human services, Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Last year, Collins supported a procedural motion to allow the president’s big signature bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to come up for debate on the Senate floor. The senator did so, she explained, out of respect for the authority of her conference’s leadership.

Ms. Collins sometimes scores wins that a blue-state electorate would appreciate. Over the years, she joined Democrats in passing a host of bills, and she has provided a key vote to block measures backed by her party. During the first Trump administration, she was one of three Republicans who helped kill the push for the so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare.

On the campaign trail, Collins makes much of her focus on real results for her home state, putting her relationships and institutional knowledge to productive use. She and her campaign team can tick through numerous examples in which she secured federal investment in this business or protected funding for that public program. Forget the national vibes; she is all about getting stuff done for Mainers.

Except that, in recent years, this often involves merely undoing sweeping damage done by Donald Trump — getting grants restored to the University of Maine or preserving funding to hire seasonal workers at Acadia National Park. This summer, she won tariff exemptions for Canadian road salt and cement.

While Collins might be commended for calculated actions, like scoring road-salt relief — and for her outspoken criticism of tariffs more broadly — the Trump’s feud with Canada will still kick her state in the teeth. 

Winning seasonal workers for Acadia pales next to the pain caused her constituents by the administration taking a sledgehammer to the federal government. 

Whatever targeted funding she secures to sustain rural hospitals in Maine seems unlikely to make up for the harm inflicted by the Medicaid cuts in Republicans’ big, beautiful bill. And on it goes.

Collins’s electoral endurance has long driven the Democrats batty. This year, with the political winds blowing hard against the G.O.P., the blue team is more desperate than ever to crack the senator’s image as a different kind of Republican. They point out that she votes with Trump 95 percent of the time. They dismiss her breaks with her party as political theater likely coordinated with the White House. Her 2018, support of Mr. Kavanaugh is a hot line of attack.

But the real issue may be that it no longer much matters what kind of Republican Collins is. With Trump running amok, and congressional Republicans loath to stand up to him, Ms. Collins’s presence in the Senate is, on balance, costing her state far more than it is contributing. This cycle, the only way to really deliver for Maine is for its voters to reject Ms. Collins’s long-running yet increasingly specious argument that she is somehow above the political fray.