Say this for Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins: she did her best to stop a rescissions package from reaching the floor, a package that, if finally enacted, would retroactively legalize many of President Trump’s most controversial and dubious spending cuts. The $9.4 billion package would “claw back” money Congress already approved in bipartisan votes for the current budget year.

Most funding was for international aid, including food relief and AIDS drugs the U.S. has provided for free since the George W. Bush administration. The measure also zeroes out money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting a broad network of radio and television stations, including Maine Public.

Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, to which the “powerful” is automatically applied. And she was clearly uncomfortable with blowing up a bipartisan budget deal and, in effect, rubber-stamping Trump’s current, though ever-shifting priorities.

“The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it,” Collins told reporters on Tuesday. “This isn’t because we haven’t had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that OMB [Office of Management and Budget] has never provided the details that would normally be part of the process.”

But this is the Trump way. His preference is for ignorance over knowledge, not only crimping public television’s ability to produce stellar educational programs, but separately cancelling regular federal grants to libraries. One result is that the Maine State Library has had to lay off eight employees and shut down all public access, except research appointments.

Collins took the extraordinary step of voting against moving the rescissions package out of committee. Unfortunately, she couldn’t convince her Republican colleagues to join her, so it went to the floor Wednesday morning, where the usual vote-switching began.

Two other senators joined Collins in voting “No” — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a frequent Trump critic, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, who seems to have some remorse for his role in acquitting Trump on Jan. 6 impeachment charges, notoriously adding that the courts would take care of it, as they manifestly did not.

But it requires four Republican defectors, so the rescissions measures passed 51-50 after Vice President Vance was summoned to cast the tie-breaking vote. There were some curious absences among the nays — especially North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — who voted, as Collins did, against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that sets the template for the next federal budget, including tax policy, over the next decade.

Tillis decided not to seek reelection, as he hesitated on the earlier vote, yet was available Wednesday for a far more questionable effort to disrupt programs in the middle of a budget year.

Senators were plainly uncomfortable. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Armed Services Committee and will preside over a mammoth defense spending increase, said, “It concerns me as perhaps approaching a disregard for the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch under Article I” of the Constitution.

Then Wicker threw in the towel, acknowledging that OMB, not Congress, will control spending, and that “We cede that decision voluntarily to the executive branch.”

Even Collins, who showed more backbone than any other Republican senator, temporized at times. Though she was widely praised for opposing the “big, beautiful bill” on the floor, she cast a crucial tally in favor of moving it to floor.

McConnell, like Collins, opposed several nominees for Cabinet positions, but in the end there were never four Republican votes against, and Trump has gotten his way time after time.

Nor can we look for any help from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has done nothing to slow down this juggernaut, including countless rollbacks from previous grants, apparently violating the Constitution’s contract clause, and the arbitrary firings of thousands of federal workers who have had civil service protections dating back to the 1880s.

The court’s latest unsigned “emergency” order, with six Republican-appointed judges in favor, was to green-light the demolition of the Education Department’s staff. While the court has yet to explicitly rule these actions legal or constitutional, the glacial pace of federal courts — there has yet to be any trials — means by the time it does rule, agencies like the Department of Education will be essentially defunct.

There’s still one very small ray of hope. The $400 million reduction in AIDS funding was removed to win over votes, so the rescissions package has to go back to the House, which approved it earlier.

More likely, all we will have left is our votes, starting in November and continuing through the rest of Trump’s term. Those opportunities can’t come soon enough.