For the good of the whole country, the most important reelection campaign in the U.S. Senate is that of Republican Susan Collins of Maine. Collins is even more important for the good of Maine.
Collins faces a tough, strangely well-funded challenger this year in liberal Democrat Sara Gideon, the speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives. Gideon is running what, by official measure of the Wesleyan Media Project, is one of the nation’s most negative Senate campaigns, with 49.7% of her ads being of the “pure attack” variety. It’s a departure from Maine’s tradition of less-nasty politics — and bizarre against Collins, whose 24-year career has made her the epitome of old-fashioned, bipartisan graciousness.
To be clear, Collins is not at all as conservative as are many of us who have 40+-year records as Republican Reaganites. If conservative ideological purity were all that mattered, her race would barely register on the radar. There is a difference between ideological purity and consistency of principles, and Collins fully embodies the latter. Some officeholders are “moderate” because they are weak enough to be blown by the prevailing political winds, but those such as Collins act on sincerely moderate convictions, with a readily discernible intellectual consistency.
That’s why Collins is so valuable to the entire American political system: In an era of awful polarization, she’s the North Star of reasoned, trustworthy centrism that helps forge consensus. Whereas so-called “independents” such as Maine’s other senator, Angus King, earn far-left interest group ratings (lifetime just 6.17% from the American Conservative Union, with liberal Americans for Democratic Action ratings usually in the 80s), Collins has a centrist lifetime ACU score of 43.86% and ADA ratings always hovering around 50. When moderate Democrats such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman endorse her, it means she can and does serve as a bridge between parties, forming coalitions to break legislative logjams.
This isn’t some goody-two-shoes version political pattycake, either — it’s the sort of principled practicality that actually gets things accomplished. The Paycheck Protection Program helping workers during the pandemic is a testament to Collins’ legislative acumen, as was the crucial revamping of U.S. intelligence systems in 2004.
For Maine, meanwhile, Collins is poised to deliver huge victories because she is in line to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It’s considered the most powerful committee position on Capitol Hill.
I speak from direct, personal experience. I once was press secretary on the House Appropriations Committee, where my longtime boss Bob Livingston was chairman. Now I live in Alabama, whose senior senator, Richard Shelby, is the current Senate Appropriations Chairman. I have seen first-hand the advantages an Appropriations chairmanship can provide for the congressional member’s home state. It’s not that the chairman forces the creation of wasteful projects for the home state, but that projects important to the national interest tend to be located, or contracted, in the state rather than somewhere else. For Maine’s economy, this could mean hundreds of millions of extra dollars, all honest, aboveboard, and eminently defensible.
To that power base, Collins ads the diligence that has made her the only long-serving senator in history to never miss a recorded floor vote, not even once in 24 years. At 7,486 consecutive votes and counting, Collins’ record is a model and a wonder.
But, back to Collins’ principles. No matter how Mainers wanted her to vote on the controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, they should have been proud of her approach and her speech explaining it. It remains one of the two or three best Senate floor speeches I’ve ever heard.
“We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be,” Collins said. “We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”
I’ve watched closely for 24 years as Susan Collins stood as a beacon of dispassionate fairness and decency no matter how high everyone else’s flames of political passions. That’s why she earned my admiration even when I disliked some of her votes. The national body politic would be far poorer if the Senate and Maine are denied her leadership.
