Donald Trump and maga Republicans must eliminate Immigration and Customs ICE evil operations

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski says
Homeland Security secretary should resign amid rising calls for her firing or impeachment by Lisa Mascaro for AP published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska.

WASHINGTON, DC— A groundswell of voices have come to the same conclusion: Kristi Noem must go.

From Democratic Party leaders to the nation’s leading advocacy organizations to even the most centrist lawmakers in Congress, the calls are mounting for the Homeland Security secretary to step aside after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two people who protested deportation policy.

At a defining moment in her tenure, few Republicans are rising to Noem’s defense.

Noem “has, through her words, and I think in her actions — she’s taken a direction that has not been helpful to the situation, and I don’t think that it helps the country," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

“I think you have a secretary right now that needs to be accountable to the chaos and in some of the tragedy that we have seen,” Murkowski added. “... I voted for her. I think the president needs to look at who he has in place as a secretary of Homeland Security. I would not support her again and I think it probably is time for her to step down.”

Top House Democratic Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California said in a joint statement that “the country is disgusted by what the Department of Homeland Security has done.”

“Kristi Noem should be fired immediately,” the Democrats said, “or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.”

Republicans and Democrats call for Noem to step down❗

What started as sharp criticism of the Homeland Security secretary, and a longshot move by Democratic lawmakers signing onto impeachment legislation in the Republican-controlled House, has morphed into an inflection point for Noem, who has been the high-profile face of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement regime.

Noem’s brash leadership style and remarks in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti, R.N., and Renee Good — in which she suggested Pretti “attacked” officers and portrayed the events leading up to Good’s shooting an “act of domestic terrorism” — have been seen as doing irreparable damage, as events on the ground disputed her account.

Her alliance with Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who was recalled from the Minnesota operation Monday as border czar Tom Homan took the lead, has left her isolated on Capitol Hill.

“What she’s done in Minnesota should be disqualifying. She should be out of a job,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

But Donald Trump stands by Noem and praises her work

President Donald Trump defended Noem at multiple junctures, strongly indicating her job does not appear to be in immediate jeopardy.

Asked by reporters as he left the White House on Tuesday for a trip to Iowa whether Noem is going to step down, Trump had a one-word answer: “No.”

Pressed later during an interview on Fox (Fake❗) News if he had confidence in Noem, the president said, “I do.”🙄

“Who closed up the border? She did,” Trump said, “with Tom Homan, with the whole group. I mean, they’ve closed up the border. The border is a tremendous success.”

As Democrats in Congress threaten to shut down the government as they demand restrictions on Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Noem’s future at the department faces serious questions and concerns.

The Republican leadership of the House and Senate committees that oversee Homeland Security have demanded that department officials appear before their panels to answer for the operations that have stunned the nation with their sheer force — including images of children, including a 5-year-old, being plucked from families.

“Obviously this is an inflection point and an opportunity to evaluate and to really assess the policies and procedures and how they are being implemented and put into practice,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, where Noem had been the state’s House representative and governor before joining the administration.

Asked about his own confidence in Noem’s leadership, Thune said, “That’s the president’s judgment call to make.”

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Noem a “liar” and said she must be fired.

Fighting about DHS funding

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that DHS enforces the laws from Congress, and if lawmakers don’t like those laws, they should change them.

“Too many politicians would rather defend criminals and attack the men and women who are enforcing our laws,” McLaughlin said. “It’s time they focus on protecting the American people, the work this Department is doing every day under Secretary Noem’s leadership.”

The ability of Congress to restrict Homeland Security funding is limited, in large part because the GOP majority already essentially doubled department funding under Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts law.

Instead, Democrats are seeking to impose restraints on Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations as part of a routine annual funding package for Homeland, Defense, Health and other departments. Without action this week, those agencies would head toward a shutdown.

To be sure, Homeland Security still has strong defenders in the Congress.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus said Tuesday in a letter to Trump that he should invoke the Insurrection Act, if needed, to quell protests. The group said it would be “ready to take all steps necessary” to keep funds flowing for Trump’s immigration enforcement and removal operations.

On the job for a year, Noem has clashed at times with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, as Republicans and Democrats have sought greater oversight and accounting of the department’s spending and operations.

Noem has kept a low profile since the Saturday press conference following Pretti’s death, though she appeared Sunday on Fox (Fake❗) News.

She doubled down in that interview on criticism of Minnesota officials, but also expressed compassion for Pretti’s family.

“It grieves me to think about what his family is going through but it also grieves me what’s happening to these law enforcement officers every day out in the streets with the violence they face,” she said.
Once rare, impeachments now more common

Impeachment, once a far-flung tool brandished against administration officials, has become increasingly commonplace.

Two years ago, the Republican-led House impeached another Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, in protest over the then-Biden administration’s border security and immigration policies that allowed millions of immigrants and asylum seekers to enter the U.S. The Senate dismissed the charges.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said if the Republican chairman of the panel, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, does not launch an impeachment probe, he would.

Raskin said he would work with the top Democrats on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees to immediately launch an impeachment inquiry related to the Minnesota deaths and other “lawlessness and corruption that may involve treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

More than 160 House Democrats have signed on to an impeachment resolution from Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill.

Anchorage Daily News staff along with Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana, Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this story.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are hypocrites about Russian agression: Genuflecting to Putin is shameful appeasement

Echo opinion published in the Mississippi Daily Journal by 

Mussolini, Hitler and (interpreter Paul Otto Schmidt) British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain September 29, 1938

Genuflecting to Putin is shameful By Dick Polman 

It comes as no surprise America’s mutation of Neville Chamberlain spit in the face of our national honor during his meetup in Alaska with his Russian master, sucking up so shamelessly that any second I expected him to drop to the carpet and lick the mass murderer’s shoes.

Trump’s been doing this since forever. 

What’s just as detestable is formerly tough-on-Russia Republicans have mutely indulged his perfidies, and that oblivious Americans have rewarded him with ever-higher vote totals in three straight elections.

I hate to write this. I’ve spent the summer boating, biking, and hiking, and the last thing I want to do is stew anew about the Putin appeaser, the consummate fraud, the poster child for weakness. But “we are at a perilous moment without equal in the history of this nation, and Trump is demonstrably incapable of confronting it."

I wrote that seven summers ago, when Trump was preparing to meet Putin at a summit in Helsinki. And when they met, Trump told the world that Putin had more credibility than America’s intelligence agencies. In the end, “Helsinki proved that when the stakes are highest, when the nation’s security is threatened by a seasoned enemy standing a few feet away, Trump cannot bring the requisite A-game. And the Republicans who revered Ronald Reagan as The Great Communicator, as the stalwart foe of an ‘evil empire,’ are saddled with a president who verbally waffles in defense of his country.”

Just as Hillary Clinton did during the final campaign debate nine years ago when she stated that Putin “would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

What the puppet did in Alaska – rolling out the red carpet, clapping like a cheerleader with pom poms, surrendering to the war criminal’s stance on Ukraine – was merely consistent with his long-established misbehavior. Like in 2016, when he publicly pleaded for Putin to hack Hillarys’ emails (“Russia, if you’re listening…”). Like in 2018, when he trashed the federal indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents who’d meddled with our 2016 election on his behalf (he called the indictments a “rigged witch hunt”). Like in 2022, when he praised Putin for invading Ukraine (“This is genius…He’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper”). Like when he lauded Putin’s “great charm” and boasted how much Putin “liked me.” 🙄

We may never know whether Vladimir Putin is blackmailing his pathetic supplicant or whether he’s just masterfully exploiting Trump’s grand canyon of neediness. We’re collateral casualties of his mission to reward Putin for the original sin of waging war on an independent nation.

It’d be nice if Democrats could manage to craft a relentless 24/7 message about his soft-on-Russia weakness and the MAGA GOP’s appeasement. 

But somehow that’s too heavy a lift for the perpetually supine blue team. Suffice it to say that if the situation was reversed — if, say, Barack Obama had ever clapped like a trained seal after luring the murderer to American soil — Republicans would already be screaming about treason and citing Article III of the Constitution, which in part defines “Treason against the United States” as “adhering to (our) Enemies, giving them 

Aid and Comfort.” (Maine Writer: In fact, a "dropped microphone" report put President Obama on the media hot seat when he told Russia about how he would have more leverage after his re-election- that made the news cycle for about a full week see New York Times:  "Microphone Catches a Candid Obama")

And, the Grand Old Party (now extinct) Republicans would’ve been right.

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia

Donald Trump and Republicans kidnapping innocent people for the politial purpose of increasing illegal deportations

Echo opinion letter published in Juneau Empire news, in Alaska:

Liberty is dead. In the first few months since January 20, 2025, the federal government has kidnapped hundreds of people and sent them to a foreign prison to serve an indefinite sentence, even though they were never charged with a crime.

I have seen these kidnappings referred to as “deportations,” but using that language lends an air of legality that the feds do not deserve. These kidnappings don’t follow settled United States law on deportations or anything else. At no point has the Trump administration offered legal justification for giving these individuals a life sentence in a foreign prison — something the United States has never ❗done before.

To anyone who questions them, the feds repeat until they are blue in the face that these men are “illegal alien terrorist gang members.” That’s a nice combination of scary words, but since when did the land of liberty hand out life sentences just because some feds say a magic incantation of scary words? This administration is testing the American people to see if we will let them use the Constitution as toilet paper.

So far it seems that millions of my fellow Americans are content to shrug it off and see no issue with giving a life sentence to individuals who have never been charged with a crime — so long as those individuals are brown-skinned and the prison is in another country. 

Yes, I understand folks may be tired of hearing politicians called Nazis or fascists, but what else do you call this?

From David Fure in Juneau Alaska

COVID pandemic - ambiguous status

Ashish Jha, the Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, asked. “I think we can definitively say....people don’t appreciate about Delta (COVID), is that it finds pockets of unvaccinated people and just rips through them. If you’re an older person living in this country, and you’re not vaccinated, it’s going to be a very bad winter.”

Dr. Ashish Jha is the Brown University dean, School of Public Health

At Senate Health Committee Hearing, U.S. Senator Susan Collins questioned two of the nation’s top public health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, at a Senate Health Committee hearing about the federal government’s ongoing response to COVID-19. Today’s hearing, titled “Next Steps: The Road Ahead for the COVID-19 Response,” was the Committee’s fourth hearing with federal officials on the pandemic this year.

Senator Collins began by asking Dr. Fauci why COVID-19 is taking such a heavy toll on the State of Maine. Maine is one of the most highly vaccinated states in the country, and 95 percent of Mainers over age 65 have been fully vaccinated.

Why such ambiguity? Maine data seems counterintuitive to what the media is reporting.  Dhruv Khullar reports "Another winter of COVID", in the October 18, 2021, edition of The New Yorker:

The coronavirus pandemic in the United States appears, for the moment, to be in retreat. Since the start of September, daily cases have dropped by a third, and daily hospitalizations have fallen by more than a quarter. COVID deaths, which generally lag behind infections by a few weeks, are now starting to decline from their peak. 

Nevertheless, some areas of the US are still struggling. In Alaska, where only half the population is fully vaccinated, hospitals are at capacity and doctors have had to ration intensive care. But, nationwide, the Delta wave is waning. The question now is: What does the winter hold?

There are reasons for optimism. Seventy-eight per cent of adults in the U.S. have now received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, and recent mandates are pushing this number higher. Millions of vulnerable Americans are now getting booster shots, and by Halloween Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine may be authorized for use among children aged five to eleven. Earlier this month, Merck announced that its antiviral drug molnupiravir roughly halves the likelihood that people with mild or moderate COVID will be hospitalized or die. Because the drug is administered orally—not by infusion or injection, as monoclonal antibodies are—it could dramatically change how COVID is treated outside of hospitals, and result in fewer people ending up inside them. Meanwhile, rapid antigen tests, which can help schools and workplaces open more safely, appear to be on the brink of widespread use. This progress is unfolding against an epidemiological backdrop in which at least a third of Americans have been infected by the virus and carry some level of natural immunity.

But there’s also a less promising scenario. The U.S. has the lowest vaccination rate among wealthy democracies, and has now fallen behind many poorer nations, such as Uruguay, Cambodia, and Mongolia. The anti-vaccine movement remains a potent force. Last Monday, protesters tore down a COVID testing site in New York City. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in six adults nationwide remains adamantly opposed to vaccination; only a third of parents say that they plan to get their children inoculated immediately after the vaccine is authorized, and a quarter say that they “definitely” won’t. In the U.K., ninety-seven per cent of people over sixty-five are fully vaccinated; during the Delta wave there, daily cases reached eighty per cent of record levels, but daily deaths only eleven per cent. Just eighty-four per cent of older Americans are fully vaccinated, and cases and deaths are more tightly coupled: both recently reached around two-thirds of last winter’s levels. “Are we going to have as bad a surge this winter as last winter?” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, asked. “I think we can definitively say no. But what people don’t appreciate about Delta is that it finds pockets of unvaccinated people and just rips through them. If you’re an older person living in this country, and you’re not vaccinated, it’s going to be a very bad winter.”

During the past year and a half, the virus repeatedly surprised us, prompting public-health revisions, reversals, and mea culpas. It’s never been clear why the virus surges in one place and not another, why it fades when it does, or how it will evolve next. Any number of factors can introduce uncertainty into our prognostications, and each threatens to push “normal” beyond yet another horizon. Still, it’s possible to wrap our heads around some of the biggest issues. One is in-person contact. When societies open up, rates of infection almost always increase. In the U.S., most business closures and strict capacity restrictions are ending; in-person instruction has resumed at schools and colleges; the weather is cooling, and we are spending more time indoors. 

All this means that the virus will have more opportunities to spread.

The consequences of that spread will depend, in part, on how many people remain susceptible and to what extent immunity wanes. The passage of time may be especially problematic for communities with high rates of prior infection and low levels of current vaccination. A recent C.D.C. study in Kentucky found that people who had previously been infected but never got vaccinated were more than twice as likely to be re-infected as those who got immunized after contracting the virus were. Among vaccinated people, breakthrough infections, while unnerving, remain uncommon and generally mild, even with the Delta variant, but the chance that a breakthrough will develop into a serious illness seems to increase with time, as immunity ebbs, especially for older people. Our collective immunity will rise and fall, through some combination of booster shots, repeat infections, and time. “It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge,” Robert Wachter, the chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said. “The minute you’re done, you have to get started all over again.” Complicating all this is the possibility that a new coronavirus variant could unsettle whatever equilibrium we reach.

Only two per cent of people in low-income countries have received even a single dose of a COVID vaccine. This is both a moral and a public-health failure: each week, thousands of people around the world die a vaccine-preventable death, and, as the virus continues to circulate unchecked, the probability of ever more dangerous variants rises. In June, the daily coronavirus case counts in the U.S. were a tenth of what they are today, and lower than at any point since the start of the pandemic. Then came Delta, and nearly a hundred thousand American COVID deaths. “What happens next depends a lot on whether this virus evolves into an even worse strain,” Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said. “We don’t have this thing contained globally. Heck, we don’t have it contained here. So far, the U.S. hasn’t been home base for a major new variant. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta—they all came from other parts of the world. But we are such an epicenter that, in the future, we could be the Greek-letter originator.”

There’s only so much that individuals can control about the viral threat they’ll face this winter. But whether our immune systems are prepared will be determined by the choices we make today. Gaps in vaccination rates of a few percentage points can be hugely consequential, especially when the lower rates are concentrated in certain communities and high-risk groups. 

Perhaps the safest prediction is that reopening, variants, and immunity will combine in disparate ways for people, depending on their age, health, and risk tolerance, as well as their neighbors’ decisions. We all walked into this pandemic together. 

But we’ll leave it at different speeds, and at different times*. 

*Maine Writer P.S.- Ambiguity in stereo!

Donald Trump is selling out American institutions and safeguards

Echo opinion letter published in the Alaska Juneau Empire newspaper: Disintegration of America’s democracy

Trump is oblivious to the consequences of any of his statements or actions.

As a 70-year-old Alaskan, I reminisce about my junior high school civics class where I was proud to learn that our country, founded 244 years ago, is populated by citizens who are granted equal status under our constitution. There is no privileged class or privileged individual. Intentionally, our government was designed to spread power among three equal branches, each with unique responsibilities and each acts as a check on the other two branches.

Imagine my dismay in observing in my lifetime the disintegration and “selling out” of a growing list of our institutions and safeguards written into our Constitution.

Every American now knows, except for those who choose sources of information which shield them from the truth, that our president initiated and directed an extortion campaign over a very vulnerable ally engaged in active combat with our preeminent adversary, Russia.

That act of extortion was clear to everyone involved to be predicated on the objective of coercing this ally, engaged in an existential struggle to free itself from a history of corruption, to commit a corrupt act by producing almost certainly manufactured evidence of unlawful and corrupt behavior of President Donald Trump’s expected political opponent. This is no stretch of the imagination for American citizens. This clearly is the man we now know Trump to be — of course he would feel uninhibited in this kind of corrupt behavior to further his personal advantage using the power of his office and illegally withholding funds appropriated by Congress to an ally in the throes of war.

Now, we American citizens have the added insult, that the Congress is complicit in this flagrant violation of the principles and high standards that have always made the United States of America a living example of democracy that peoples all over the globe want to emulate.

We have always proudly believed that our Congress would safeguard the institutions and founding principles of our democracy by rooting-out wrongdoing and corruption in our government and holding offenders accountable, even the president. We are no longer that shining example for other struggling democracies.

Trump has denigrated law enforcement officials, our national security professionals, and our diplomatic corps, favoring and promoting what National Security Council specialist Fiona Hill described as a “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” This is serious business; a matter concerning our own national security. Trump is oblivious to the consequences of any of his statements or actions, rather focusing only on how it might benefit his personal interests.

Now Congress has failed to call-out the president’s corrupt behavior. Surely, Congress could have at least censured the president’s corrupt acts. Some Senators have foolishly imagined that Trump has learned his lesson, but immediately he is on the war path weeding out any member of his administration who fails to be sufficiently subservient to his personal interests.

Today we learn that the president has coerced Attorney General William Barr to intervene in the lawful prosecution of Trump’s stooge and self-avowed dirty tricks operative, Roger Stone, to reduce his prison sentence. The Justice Department is apparently no longer a politically independent institution of justice for the American people, but a tool of the President.

Step-by-step we are sliding into an authoritarian form of government in which the president’s political adversaries (essentially 60% of our population) are labeled “very bad people” and “scum.”

More frighteningly, Trump has adopted the dictators’ trope of calling our news media an “enemy of the people” aligning Trump with Stalin, Mao and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; a chilling disintegration of Constitutionally guaranteed principles.

How far must our situation deteriorate before Congress takes a principled stand to safeguard our country’s constitutionally promised heritage?

• Alexander Hoke resides in Juneau.

Women's political clout

Republicans are obviously incapable of standing truth to power but the women showed their male colleagues how to be courageous.  In fact, two Republcian somen- Senator Susan Collins and Senator Lisa Murkowski, handed the Republican men a lesson in political leadership. In fact, the take away message is this: Senator Mitch McConnell made a stupid and irretreeivable mistake by keeping women out of negotiations on the failed Trumpcare disaster.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the Health Vote Heroines- By Gail Collins  

Senator Susan Collins of Maine

Were you expecting the Republican health care bill to go down with such a thud this week? Definitely a moment to remember. Unless, of course, you accept Donald Trump’s interesting theory that it all worked out exactly the way he wanted.

“I said from the beginning — let Obamacare implode and then do it,” the president told a group of law enforcement officers on Friday. This was part of the White House celebration of “American Heroes Week,” which was highlighted by Trump’s surprise effort to discriminate against transgender volunteers in the military. 

But of course he really, really wanted a bill to sign. Maybe he was too distracted by the subtle plotting against Reince Priebus to focus. Otherwise, he’s just the worst lobbyist in history. 

And he underestimated two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. John McCain’s “no” vote was the high point of the drama, but Collins and Murkowski were the fierce, consistent forces of resistance that gave McCain his opportunity. 

My favorite moment came when Trump dispatched Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to warn Murkowski that if she continued to vote against the bill, her home state of Alaska would lose stuff it wanted from the federal government.

The Alaska Dispatch News speculated that the projects Zinke threatened to ax included “future opportunities to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” If so, cynical minds noted, he was basically warning Murkowski that if she didn’t behave, he might attempt to protect the environment.

But Collins and Murkowski care a lot about women’s issues; their joint stand was the logical outcome of a year that’s been marked by an utter Republican indifference to women. Both serve on the Senate committee that handles health care — a fact that did not appear to impress Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when he appointed 13 men to get together behind closed doors and write a health care bill.

The plan the guys came up with made no attempt to control insurance costs for maternal care. It would end the requirement that health care plans cover contraceptives. And it would bar Medicaid reimbursements for any services provided by Planned Parenthood.

“It was a huge mistake for the Republican leadership to put that in there. Lisa and Susan were clear from the start — you hurt Planned Parenthood and we’re not with it,” said Patty Murray, the leading Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

The week before the health care debacle Representative Blake Farenthold, a very conservative and extremely strange lawmaker from Texas, told a radio interviewer he was irritated with the way the women were holding things up, adding, “If it was a guy from South Texas I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style.”

It was a remarkable comment and only in part because you do not find many politicians who express a desire to be like Aaron Burr. Farenthold was actually talking about shooting the women.

Collins seemed unmoved. She mentioned the incident in a private conversation with a colleague that happened to be picked up by a politician’s greatest enemy, the hot mike. She briefly made fun of Farenthold’s very large physique and asked, ”Did you see the picture of him in his pajamas next to this Playboy bunny?” She later apologized. Nobody should mock people’s physical appearance. However, to be fair, men who are planning a political career should not pose for photographs while wearing blue pajamas covered with yellow ducks.

That conversation — with Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island — was actually more important for the way it captured the growing feeling in the Senate that the president was more than just a little eccentric.

“I think — I think he’s crazy,” said Reed. To which Collins responded, “I’m worried.”

As are we all.

nue reading the main storyPerhaps we will read about this in “The Art of the Deal: Presidential Edition.” (“If you need to win over one special vote, try to do it with threats. This is particularly effective if your target has more power than you do.”) The administration, which so far has barely managed to exercise enough clout to get a building renamed, was trying to strong-arm an influential committee chairwoman whose Senate term does not end until 2023 — a date that, many of her colleagues believe fervently, is a lot longer than they are likely to be dealing with Donald Trump.

Murkowski and Collins continued voting “no” because they believed that Trumpcare would be bad for the people in their states. Other Republican senators felt the same way, but lacked the same nerve.

“They were amazing,” said Chuck Schumer, the extremely happy Senate Democratic leader.

Both women have had memorable Senate careers, but neither has always been what you’d call a profile in courage. Collins’s Maine constituents give her a lot of latitude. Murkowski, who was first appointed to her seat by her father the governor, is known for her intense devotion to all forms of oil drilling.