I won’t mince words: It’s time for Susan Collins to quit the Republican Party and run as an independent.
Nine years ago, Maine’s senior senator declared in a column she wrote for The Washington Post that she would not vote for Donald Trump because he did not “reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.”
Trump’s “inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy,” Collins wrote, made him unworthy of the White House.
The op-ed decried “his constant stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize” and his readiness to “slash and burn and trample anything and anyone he perceives as being in his way.”
Trump hasn’t changed. Sadly, though, Collins may have.
“I am a Republican because I believe in the core party principles of individual responsibility, personal liberty, federalism and a strong national defense,” Collins told the Ripon Forum in 2006.
Ten years later, in that 2016 column, Collins said that part of what defined her as a person was “being a Republican” who revered “the history of my party, most particularly the value it has always placed on the worth and dignity of the individual.”
Most of us who can remember the last GOP presidential nominee Collins could stomach — Mitt Romney in 2012 — understand where she’s coming from. Republicans used to stand for limited government, fiscal responsibility and personal freedom.
Trump, who is putting troops on the streets of America’s cities, doesn’t care a whit about most of that.
The Republican Party Collins professed to love is long gone. Today, almost every Republican lawmaker in the nation’s capital and most everywhere else is on board for whatever ill-considered policy Trump insists on, whether it’s having anonymous, masked men snatch mothers off the street or taking steps to wipe out the country’s public health system, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the latest example.
Collins sometimes expresses concern about something or another, but she approved Trump’s ridiculous nominees for the country’s most important appointed positions and helped pass some of his proposals into law. She’s done next to nothing to block his agenda.
Collins seems to be so determined to remain a Republican that she doesn’t care that the GOP she grew up admiring lies in ruins.
I know there are still many decent Republicans, some of whom are my friends. But if they still believe in the party, they’re living in the past. Trump is the party’s leader and has over time also become its ugly heart and soul.
If Collins wants to hold true to the ideals she grew up with and adhere to the standards set in years past by Mainers such as Bill Cohen, Olympia Snowe and Margaret Chase Smith, she has to cut ties to a party that no longer abides by the principles of its past and run as an independent.
Fortunately for her, Maine is a friendly place for independents. The state has elected two different independent governors in the past half century, including her colleague in the Senate, Angus King. As an unaffiliated candidate, Collins could renounce Trump and continue to champion her own version of what politics should be.
One of her closest friends in the Senate, Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, took that route in 2006 after losing a Democratic primary because he refused to kowtow to party loyalists who no longer supported the policies he did. Lieberman won reelection in a three-way race that year.
In Maine, which has ranked-choice voting, Collins would have a decent shot at reelection as an independent, likely earning the second-place selection from nearly every Republican voter who would rather have her than a Democrat.
For that to work, she would have to beat one of the party nominees in the first round. That’s certainly doable, if not guaranteed.
By running as a Republican, though, Collins is declaring she is comfortable with what her party is today: the party of Trump. If she doesn’t see that, she’s either lying to herself … or lying to us.
