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Maine Senator Susan Collins has a lot of friends. First elected to the Senate in 1996, she developed a reputation as a reasonable, moderate Republican willing to work across the aisle to get things done. These years of niceties and moderation, culminating in her party-breaching vote to convict Donald Trump in his post-Jan. 6 impeachment trial, have turned Collins into one Democrats’ last remaining hopes for making progress in a deadlocked Congress, and a potential saving grace should the Grand Old Party decided to wholeheartedly embrace Trumpism once again.
Or, that’s the narrative that Susan Collins likes to put forward. In reality, she has proved time and time again to be just as craven as the rest, and only interested in moderation or bipartisanship when it serves her agenda.
Last week, shortly after Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Collins immediately started to manage expectations for whether she might support a Biden-nominated replacement. “I felt that the timetable for the last nominee was too compressed,” she said, referring to the whiplash confirmation process of hard-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett just five weeks after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Collins eventually voted against Coney Barrett, then immediately went back to her home swing state and began campaigning.
You could view this decision and Collins’ vote to convict Trump a few months later as the defining aisle-crossing moments in recent congressional history. On paper, they seem like a lot: a vote against her party’s Supreme Court nominee and another to convict its president in an impeachment trial. But in both cases, the outcome was already secure. With Barrett, the GOP safely had enough votes to confirm without Collins. With Trump, they had more than enough to acquit him. Part of Collins’ moderate reputation comes from her stated support for a woman’s right to choose. In Supreme Court battles and some federal legislation, Collins is seen as a “gettable” vote because of her views on abortion – she has said multiple times that she supports codifying Roe v. Wade – yet when a bill that could do so came up, she shot it down.
Now, consider an even more marginal case: Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. Collins held the entire political world in thrall for weeks as she mulled her choice of whether to vote to confirm the boisterous former frat boy credibly accused of sexual misconduct. In the end, she sent him to the bench for life, as did fellow “moderate” Lisa Murkowski. It’s telling that this decision, in 2018, didn’t come in an election year, when Collins would need to tout her bipartisanship in an increasingly Democratic Maine, as she did following her vote against Coney Barrett.
Collins is now safe until 2026, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still going to perform her little song and dance. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopolous this week, Collins bobbed and weaved around the question of her support for Trump, should he choose to run again in 2024. In a cop-out for saying whether or not she’d support him, Collins downplayed Trump’s chances, as Mother Jones noted. (Trump is currently leading theoretical polls for the GOP nomination.)
Like Mitt Romney, Collins is a master of walking the fine line of catering to the center while serving the right. The expectation is that if she’s politically insulated from the consequences — not in an election year, and not the deciding vote — she’ll put through whomever Biden nominates, particularly if that’s the GOP’s preferred anti-labor candidate Michelle Childs. But if for some reason West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin seems on the fence about Biden’s nominee and seating a progressive jurist could come down to Collins vote alone, Democrats would be fools to expect things to go their way. Then again, Biden’s pitch to America over the past two years has been that he could unite the moderate center of American politics. Thus far, it’s resulted largely in unmitigated failure. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Susan Collins helps deliver more of the same.
