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Debra Spark is a Maine novelist.
If you are a Republican or a Democrat whose New Year’s resolution was to spend less time on social media, you may have missed Janet Mills’s quick response to President Donald Trump’s audacious action in Venezuela. First, she noted that Sen. Susan Collins gave a “greenlight” to his behavior by earlier voting against checks on his abuse of power. And why, I can’t help but wonder.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of executive overreach in the history of the United States. Yet Collins offered a muted response to Trump’s latest affront, noting Nicolás Maduro is a bad guy (no argument there) and that Congress should have been briefed, as well as involved going forward. She also claimed this was a “limited scope operation, run in conjunction with law enforcement.”
What law enforcement would that be? The laws that allow you to go into a foreign country and remove an unethical leader and start to make decisions for that country as if it were your own? The law that lets you kill at least 70 people in order to capture a criminal? The law that allows you to legitimize similar takeovers across the globe, giving Chinese President Xi Jinping the excuse he’s been looking for to take Taiwan, whose chip manufacturing capabilities are the foundation of the global economic system? (International war to follow?)
Second, Mills noted three action items for Collins. She suggested putting a hold on upcoming Defense and State department nominations and using Collins’ current position as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee to demand a public hearing on this action and Trump’s intentions regarding Venezuela’s governance. Mills also suggested a “provision in the upcoming appropriations bills to prohibit any funds being used in Venezuela, or on Venezuelan governance, or on military support for oil operations in Venezuela without authorization from the U.S. Congress.”
In quickly detailing what Collins should do, and how what she has failed to do has led to this dangerous moment for American democracy, Mills cements my support for her.
I appreciate Graham Platner’s outrage in this moment, but it’s the “to do” list that impresses me, evidence that Mills knows (and she frequently seems to know off the top of her head) what should be done next.
I struggle to understand how any decent person can give Trump a pass on his consistently appalling behavior. There’s such a long list of unacceptable, un-American things he has done. Most recently his responses to the deaths of Rob Reiner and Tatiana Schlossberg could not have been more repulsive, all the more so because those individuals died so tragically.
That isn’t Collins’ way. I think of her recent Facebook post about Mainers who showed up for victims of the recent wharf fire in Portland, and her frank appreciation for Mainers “who just want to help.
But Trump isn’t someone who wants to help.
So why has she not more forcefully, legislatively stopped him?
He spoke almost gleefully of watching the Venezuelan kidnapping on screen, as if it were a movie, not noting that he’d just killed 70 people.
I’d like all the money that went into that action — into building a replica of Maduro’s compound, so the soldiers would know how to storm it — to go to what I and other Americans need right now. My self-employed son, my retired husband and I (with employer health insurance) all had both our health insurance payments and our deductibles double this year. My bills have never been higher. But not my income.
I lost a great ongoing writing assignment, thanks to Trump’s actions against Harvard. As for losses down the line, three of my family members have already died of cancer, so what of the research that would prevent more Americans dying of the disease?
Which brings me back to New Year’s resolutions. Mine is to work for a Congress that will govern America with decency and heart.