Belgrade Lakes, Me. — My wife and I gathered around the television on Friday to listen to our senior senator, Susan Collins, announce her final decision on the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Four sentences in, she began denouncing “special interest groups” who’d opposed him for the court, as if the only entities to weigh in on the nomination had been forces on the left. Six sentences in, she was decrying the groups who’d “whipped their followers into a frenzy by spreading misrepresentations and outright falsehoods.” We were in the first minute of a speech that would go on for 44 more.
“Uh-oh,” said my wife. “She’s going to cave.”
I nodded, although what I thought in my heart was — had there ever been any doubt? Ms. Collins, our senator since 1996, has a reputation for being an independent; a moderate; even — what was the term? — oh yes, a maverick.
But if Ms. Collins is a maverick, then I’m an appaloosa.
Yes, she’s shown herself willing to buck her party now and again. FiveThirtyEight reports that she votes in line with Donald Trump 79 percent of the time; only Rand Paul of Kentucky, at 74 percent, has a lower score among Senate Republicans. She’s opposed the president on immigration and abortion restrictions, net neutrality and his policies toward Russia, Iran and North Korea.
But on many key votes, her record is about as moderate as Ted Cruz’s. In January, she provided the Republicans with the crucial 51st vote for the tax bill. She set three conditions: the additional passage of two separate bills to shore up insurance markets for individuals who weren’t covered through their work, along with a promise for Congress to undo the cuts to Medicare automatically triggered by the deficit increase from the tax cut.
She is a very unremarkable women as well as a Senator. She garnered too much acclaim in the past for mostly all wrong reasons. I am not surprised here (she thrives on the attention) but I acknowledge it will be tough for us Mainers to get rid of her -since Maine is old and has very low expectations.
After that bill was passed, Ms. Collins said the promises to her were ironclad, and that if her conditions were not met, “there would be consequences.” But the additional bills never got a vote, and a follow-up attempt to add her provisions to the omnibus spending bill in March was defeated, by other Republicans.
Of course they were.
As a voter in Maine for the last 30 years, I’ve been represented by a broad spectrum of independent statesmen and women. During my first year living here, we had dinner in a Skowhegan restaurant called the Heritage House, and at the table next to ours was Margaret Chase Smith, who, of course, stood up against the tactics of Joseph McCarthy in 1950 with her “Declaration of Conscience” speech. We stood up to shake her hand. I still remember that moment, the sparkle in her fierce eyes. It was like looking directly into history.
We’ve been represented by other mavericks in the last half-century. Senator William Cohen, another Republican, served as the secretary of defense for a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. George Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader, helped to bring about the Good Friday peace accords in Ireland, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. For eight years we had an independent governor, Angus King, who has gone on to represent our state as an independent in the Senate. (My wife and I are public supporters of, and have a long friendship with, the Kings.) Being independently minded is a tradition in Maine, as much a part of who we are as lobsters, moose hunting and whoopie pies.
But there are different ways of being a maverick. For Smith, it meant taking a stand, opposing McCarthy at the apex of his power. For Arizonan John McCain, it meant voting against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, at least when no provisions had been made for the 20 million Americans who would have suddenly found themselves without health care.
There’s another kind of “maverick,” though — the kind of centrist who wants to please everyone. For Ms. Collins, it’s often meant voting with the most right-wing members of her party, even while attempting to occupy some imaginary moral high ground. It’s hard to see what our senator got for her vote supporting the tax cut last fall. It’s just as hard for me to see her vote for Judge Kavanaugh as anything other than a warm embrace of Donald Trump and everything he stands for, her 45-minute speech notwithstanding.
Two years ago, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, she said she would not be voting for him: “I revere the history of my party, most particularly the value it has always placed on the worth and dignity of the individual, and I will continue to work across the country for Republican candidates. It is because of Mr. Trump’s inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy that I am unable to support his candidacy.”
And yet, at some of the most crucial moments of Mr. Trump’s presidency, she has voted to empower him. In giving him a victory on Judge Kavanaugh, she has emboldened Mr. Trump to continue down the very path she claims to detest: denigrating women, bullying opponents, choosing the most combative approach to every disagreement. Based on the judge’s snarling, partisan, bullying demeanor at his hearing, Judge Kavanaugh seems determined to be the kind of justice who is exactly the opposite of that legacy she once spoke of preserving.
In so doing, she has proved herself, in the end, to stand for nothing.
In her Declaration of Conscience speech, Margaret Chase Smith said that Joe McCarthy had debased the Senate to “the level of a forum of hate and character assassination.”
Last week, Donald Trump ridiculed the suffering of Christine Blasey Ford before a jeering, laughing crowd. Three days later, Ms. Collins voted to confirm his nominee, a man who has pledged to bring exactly the same variety of partisan venom to the Supreme Court.
One can only wonder what Margaret Chase Smith would think of Ms. Collins now.
Mitch McConnell's comparison of Collins to Smith in his remarks Friday was befitting of a swamp king whose leadership has shown the Senate for what it is: a machine operated by disciplined, cold blooded reptiles for whom hate and divisiveness are useful tools and decorum, integrity and respect for humans are optional. Very happy to see Ms. Boylan setting this part of the record straight.
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