february 17–march 1, 2020 | new york 37grams in Maine would be getting more than $600,000 in
money to support better housing options for those with
disabilities. And recent ads cite almost $20 million in fed-
eral funding Collins secured to build a breakwater in the
town of Lubec, part of an attempt to increase safe working
conditions for fishermen there.
Collins probably has such good committee assignments
because McConnell wants to keep her vote. In fact, that
streak of independence and potential unpredictability is
probably why so many of her Maine predecessors—including
Mitchell, Cohen, Muskie, and Snowe—have enjoyed dispro-
portionate power in the Senate. Independence is a way to
exert leverage in a legislative body where your state might not
otherwise have much.
For a while, Collins made use of that leverage to challenge her
own party’s dogma. She was a proponent of repealing “don’t ask,
don’t tell”; she was one of only three Republicans to oppose the so-
called partial-birth abortion ban; she voted to acquit Bill Clinton of
impeachment charges in 1998. She ultimately supported Dodd-
Frank legislation (though progressive critics note that she pushed
to make it less effective).
“You need to look at how the landscape of the Senate has changed,”
said Susan Young, editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.
“She became well known nationally in an era of the gangs: the Gang
of 14, the gangs formed over the avoidance of the nuclear option or
the stimulus package. She was one of the people at the center of
those debates, negotiating ways to resolve thorny issues. But now
we’re in the era of Mitch McConnell, and he’s not interestedin com-
promise. So when we talk about how Susan Collins is not so moder-
ate anymore, that’s more of a view of how politics has changed, not
how she has changed. We’re criticizing her for not doing something
that just isn’t happening in the Senate anymore.”
Collins herself bemoans the shrinking of her moderate lane.
Speaking to a No Labels group in 2017, she described Facebook
comments from the right, calling her “clearly bought andpaid for
by the far left.” “That, my friends, is what it’s like to be in the middle
these days ... you are criticized, and in some cases despised, by both
sides ... It feels like the moderate middle is melting like late-winter
snow in Maine.”
Collins’s friend Mary Small noted that when she was serving in
the state senate, as a pro-choice Republican, “we used to have a
pretty big umbrella under which everybody could fit. But not any-
more. I think it was the tea party. LePage exacerbated it.” Still, she
said, the fact that the party has moved right doesn’t mean that old-
fashioned Republicans like her and Collins are the left.
“Just because she’s a moderate doesn’t mean she’s a Democrat,”
said Small, noting that Collins’s Republican colleagues, who are
expected to vote Republican, don’t “get the horrid, nasty stuff that
she gets.” But, as Small says, “she’s still a Republican, and she
became a Republican for reasons.”
Democrats who came to imagine Collins as a true allyperhaps
didn’t pay close enough attention to her established friendships
with the Bush family, with Karl Rove. Maybe it’s hard to remember,
in an age in which the new, hard-right Republican Party has cast its
elders in a flattering but distorting light, that differences—both
ideological and tribal—are by degree. And that independence
within that party has always had its limitations. “While Bush was
president, she was for the line-item veto,” said one Collins critic.
“Then a reporter asked her after Obama was elected, and she said,
‘Oh, I’m not for the line-item veto.’ ” None of this is atypical for a
senator in this era; it is at odds with the vision of a woman who
claims to put her independent beliefs above party loyalty.
Former senator Harry Reid recalled how during Obama’s first
term, when he was majority leader, “one of the first things we had to
do was get a stimulus bill passed.” Reid said he immediately went todetractorsmentionagainandagain:Althoughshehasa reputation
forex cellentconstituentservices,includingmultiplesatelliteoffices
wherepeoplewhoare havingtroublegettingdisability orSocial
Securitypaymentscancometoforhelpfromherstaff,criticsagree
thatsheherselfremainsdeterminedlyinaccessibleincontexts
wherepeoplemightspeakplainly. (Collins’s officedisputesthis.)
Buttheperceptionofthat inaccessibility leavesfrustratedMain-
ersreadytopouncewheneverandwhereverthey doseeher—in
storesandonairplanes—andCollinsvulnerabletothekindsof
impromptuencounterssheseemstoloatheandthat tendtospiral
evenfurtheroutofhercontrol.
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 Pharma’s Sack-
ler 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.
The combustible interactions with constituents create a particu-
larly strong contrast with King, Maine’s independent senator who
caucuses with the Democrats and is famously gregarious and avail-
able; he asks his staff to call him “Angus” and talks to everyone all
the time. When he got to the Senate in 2013, he and Collins com-
municated constantly. Toby McGrath, a political consultant who
has worked for King, remembered Collins joking that “Angus texts
me more than my niece.”
But communication between the two has slowed as King has
gotten more outspoken on issues he and Collins disagreeon, and
the nature of their interactions with Mainers couldn’t be more dif-
ferent. The weekend before the impeachment vote, Kingheld an
emotional, 300-person town hall in Brunswick, joining constitu-
ents in the recitation of Abraham Lincoln quotations.Collins
stayed in D.C. and worked.COLLINS’S DEFENDERS SUGGEST THAT many of those banging
loudest on her door these days aren’t even from Maine, and
point to her powerful roles on the Senate Appropriations Com-
mittee and on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Com-
mittee as being crucial to her state’s economic health;Collins
also points to this, noting in an emailed statement that“a lot of
people asked me to run again because of what my seniority
would mean for the state” and that next term she’s in line to be
chair of the Appropriations Committee. Collins’s fans credit her
advocacy in the passage of a defense-spending bill that sought
to boos at B a e Portsmouth
Naval rd i h in North Ber-
wick. In November, Collins announced, in her capacityas chair
of the Housing Appropriations Subcommittee, that three pro-“Just because she’s
a moderate doesn’t meanshe’s a Democrat.”