‘Dire crisis’ spurs Maine’s Collins

Sen. Susan Collins, whose support for a scaled-back stimulus bill broke a Republican filibuster and handed President Obama and the Democrats a political victory, isn’t the most popular person in her chamber’s GOP caucus right now.

Her support for the bill, she acknowledges, has come at a cost that has chilled relationships with some of her GOP colleagues, but that it was the right thing to do.

“I believe this is truly a dire crisis,” the Maine lawmaker told the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. “When we lose 600,000 jobs in one month and when unemployment in Maine is at a 16-year record high at 7 percent, and when each day brings reports of another loss of jobs in Maine and across the country, I don’t believe a responsible reaction is to just say no.”

She also touts the bipartisan efforts that went into the stimulus bill, citing six Republicans and 14 centrist Democrats who worked to scale back the bill after it left the House.

“We were able to weed out of this bill $100 billion of spending, some of which may be worthwhile, but was not stimulative,” she said.

Mrs. Collins, along with fellow senators Olympia Snowe, also from Maine, and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, provided the three critical votes that saved Mr. Obama from a setback on the central economic plank in his agenda.

Mrs. Collins’ actions have made her a pivotal leader in the Senate’s divided ranks who has the potential to decide the outcome of future battles to come in favor of the administration.

“With Senate Democrats short of a 60-seat majority and most Republicans staunchly opposed to the administration’s initiatives, Senate procedures put a handful of Republican moderates in the driver’s seat,” said William Galston who served as chief domestic adviser in the Clinton White House.

Democrats, however, are cheering her bipartisanship on Capitol Hill and in the White House, where she has been lobbied by Mr. Obama in the Oval Office. Her popularity has soared back home where she easily was re-elected to a third term last year with more than 61 percent of the vote.

“I can’t recall any criticism that I’ve come across related to her vote on the stimulus bill. She’s been widely praised in the state for her actions on the bill,” said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine.

“Anecdotally, if you go by the editorials in the newspapers here, she’s only kind of enhanced her stature in the state as a result of her role in the stimulus package.”

Miss Collins, who calls herself a fiscal conservative, said her vote was driven by the need to break the impasse on the bill and insert some needed bipartisanship into the process.

“People don’t want us to be the party that says no, just no,” she said.

The stimulus package will deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to her state, including $220 million in infrastructure spending on dozens of public works projects.

But not everyone is buying her self-described fiscal conservatism now.

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