The last weekend in July, Maine’s senior U. S. Sen. Susan Collins was at her camp on Cold Stream Pond in Enfield while her party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was on television, attacking the parents of Humayun Khan – a U. S. Army captain killed protecting his men from an approaching car bomb in Iraq – and suggesting he had sacrificed as much for his country by employing people.
For Collins, it was the final straw, another indication that Trump was dangerously unfit for office, along with his mocking of a disabled reporter and his assertion that an Indiana-born judge couldn’t preside over a case involving Trump University on account of his Mexican ancestry. She had been a Jeb Bush supporter, but now knew she could not cast a ballot for this man. “I felt compelled to speak out,” she recalls.
And speak she did, in a Washington Post op-ed denouncing Trump as a cruel, disrespectful and ill-informed figure who lacked “the temperament, self-discipline and judgment required to be president.” He lacked respect for “the constitutional separation of powers, the very foundation of our form of government” or the self-control needed to avoid “disputes spinning out of control.”
Five months later, Trump is president, his party is in control of both houses of Congress and all three branches of government, and Collins is in a vital but uncomfortable position: the most moderate member of the majority caucus of the Senate, the body most likely to constrain the new president’s excesses, be it by legislation, investigation, or confirmation hearings. She’s spoken out against his immigration ban , his omission of any mention of Jews in his Holocaust remembrance statement, his appointment of former Breitbart News executive director Stephen Bannon to the National Security Council and his nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary. Her office is flooded with phone calls and visitors, her every vote followed by journalists, her actions simultaneously praised and condemned by millions, in real time, on social media.
Sen. Susan Collins
“The Senate is our only hope for keeping some constraints in place, both for really bad policy and a descent that could lead to authoritarianism,” says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a prominent critic of Trump. “This is first and foremost about protecting the Republic but also about protecting the Republican Party from being destroyed by a group of demagogues.”
The Maine Sunday Telegram spoke with a dozen observers of U. S. politics, including scholars, political scientists, former Collins staffers and the senator herself, to explore how she sees her and the Senate’s role vis-à-vis the Trump administration, and what is at stake for the country as a whole. Most agreed that Collins’ longstanding commitment to defending the Senate’s deliberative tradition and her willingness to build centrist partnerships will be invaluable in the months and years ahead, and that the stakes are very high.
“I don’t feel that I am playing a new role in this administration,” Collins says. “I’ve always tried to bring people together and solve problems, and that’s not easy. But I will say that the pressure and pace of this since we came back into session in January have been extraordinary.”
Sarah Kendizor, a St. Louis-based scholar of Uzbekistan, is becoming a fixture on cable news because she successfully predicted so much about Trump’s actions months in advance, drawn from years of studying and living in that authoritarian Central Asian state. “The Constitution is just a piece of paper unless it’s upheld in practice, but I think a lot of Americans have taken our rights for granted and the strength of our institutions for granted,” she says. “What we’re seeing now is the speed at which democracy can be undone.”
In his first two weeks in office, Trump has alienated foreign allies and his own intelligence services, tweet-threatened China, Mexico, Iran and Chicago, issued an executive order that discriminates against Muslims and thus may not be constitutional, impugned the legitimacy of the federal judge who blocked it, and demanded Americans disbelieve their own eyes to accept his claims about the size of his inauguration crowds. His top aides have threatened journalists, while others are leaking information to them like crazy, apparently panicked over how policies are being made.
“Whatever your opinion about his intentions, it’s very clear that he’s making decisions without communicating with experts in the field, lawyers and career civil servants,” says Brian Duff, chairman of the University of New England’s political science department. “No president before has ever more needed an institution that can slow him down and think critically about what he’s doing.”
Ornstein remembers the fear and uncertainty of the Watergate crisis, when nobody was certain whether then-President Nixon – paranoid and, as declassified tapes have shown, unhinged – would relinquish power peacefully if impeached. But he notes that Congress wasn’t as militantly partisan as it is today, and White House aides “frequently deep-sixed outrageous, unconstitutional or illegal things that Nixon ordered them to do.” He has no confidence anyone around Trump would do the same, and he says the Supreme Court is less likely to provide checks as it did in 1973.
“I have no confidence that you will get any kind of independent check from the leadership of the House, and the (Democratic) minority there is pretty much powerless,” he adds. “So much of this will devolve to the Senate.”
This is where Susan Collins comes in. The Senate – with its power to block or confirm the president’s Cabinet and judicial nominees, conduct investigations, and legislate – has a thin 52-48 Republican majority, including Collins and a handful of senators who’ve on occasion bucked their leadership to defeat initiatives they found excessive or to come up with bipartisan compromises. That’s why Collins’ phone lines have been overwhelmed for much of the past week: Seeing her as potentially swayable, callers across the country have been bombarding her staff with their desires regarding Cabinet nominees and the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., listens on Jan. 23 as Maine Sen. Susan Collins discusses her Affordable Care Act replacement plan. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
“The advantage for those not following the herd is that they will have some leverage because few people are moving over to the other side,” says Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University. “Right now Collins can probably hold Trump hostage for a vote and get a yuuuge new naval facility built in Maine for her vote.”
As of Friday morning, 88.9 percent of Collins’ votes have been in accord with Trump’s and her party leadership’s wishes since Trump took office, according to a tracker set up by FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism outlet led by Nate Silver. But voting against one’s party is unusual – presumably members agree with most of what their party stands for – and that record actually makes her the second least “Trump-loyal” Senate Republican after Rand Paul of Kentucky. After she casts her vote against education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, the billionaire Michigan charter school and voucher advocate, she may well be first. The other 50 Republican senators have displayed 100 percent loyalty to date.
“So many Republicans are afraid of their own voters, and the Republican base likes Trump a whole hell of a lot more than the Republican House and Senate caucuses do,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball political newsletter at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “But while Senate Republicans may not like Trump, they also recognize that they are in this together, that if he sinks then they may sink, too.”
Collins is relatively free in this regard. She’s the most popular politician in her state – and the second most popular senator in the country after Bernie Sanders – and is not up for re-election until 2020. Maine voted for Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 points, so there’s much less of a political price to pay for defying him than there would be if she were representing ruby-red Kentucky or Alabama.
“My guess is that she’s not thinking too much about the electoral politics and she’s genuinely deeply concerned about this administration and the direction this could take,” Duff says. “But even though the Democrats see her as their last best hope, she’s a Republican, and she’s going to have conservative ideas.”
Whenever asked about her role models, Collins has always mentioned two Republican senators from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith (whom she met as a Caribou High School senior) and William Cohen (for whom she served as a staffer for her first 12 years after graduating from college). Both are famous for confronting rogue figures from their own party: Smith for being the first senator to challenge anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy; Cohen for, as a first-term House member, being one of the first Republicans to back Nixon’s impeachment.
