The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Elizabeth McKillen is a professor emerita of history at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Maine.
In a thoughtful column published in the BDN on Sept. 19, former Sen. William Cohen endorsed Sen. Susan Collins’ current bid for reelection. As a historian, I’ve long admired Cohen’s role, as a young centrist Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, in exposing the crimes of Republican President Richard Nixon during the Watergate Scandal and in being among the first to call for his impeachment. As Cohen notes in his column, his independent centrism subsequently ensured him outsized influence during his career in the Senate to carve legislative compromises which ably served the interests of Mainers.
Yet I disagree strongly with his assertion that a win for Collins would better serve the interests of Mainers and the nation than one for Troy Jackson in the current political climate.
Cohen explores the relatively close balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate in recent years and suggests this is why independent centrists are more critical than ever in crafting compromise legislation. Yet he ignores the extreme right-wing tilt of the Republican Party as the MAGA movement has grown and the ways in which Republican congressional representatives have often voted in lockstep with their leader Donald Trump, thereby marginalizing the influence of centrists.
Instead he asserts that Democrat Troy Jackson is part of the “extreme wing” of the Democratic Party and implies that it is this extremism that Americans need to fear. Yet the Democratic Socialists with whom Jackson has sometimes aligned, are not the ones currently threatening American democracy and undermining the economic well-being of Americans.
As many have argued, the Trump administration may well be a far more existential threat to American democracy than the Nixon administration. Trump has worked systematically to undermine the independence of federal agencies entrusted with overseeing vital services, brutally attacked free speech, undermined 60 years of civil rights progress, and normalized governance by executive fiat far more than Nixon. His economic policies and war with Iran have been a disaster for working Americans and have increased the gap between rich and poor.
Although Collins has opposed some Trump measures, she has supported many others. Even more importantly, she has often failed to use her leadership positions on Senate committees to fashion reasonable compromises before legislation is voted on by the Senate. Yet, significantly, Cohen asserts that committee leadership positions should be one of the major sources of influence for a senior senator.
One key example I see of Collins’ failed committee leadership is her decision and vote, as chair of the Appropriations Committee, to allow Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill to proceed to a vote of the entire Senate without first eliminating some of the massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare proposed by the bill. I believe Collins’ best chance for protecting these important programs lay within the committee rather than on the floor of the Senate where she likely knew the MAGA majority would prevail and prevent substantial changes. In this sense her final vote against the Big Beautiful Bill looks largely like a symbolic act.
Collins has also failed to use her power as Appropriations Committee chair to cut back funding for ICE, the Iran War and arms shipments to Israel. Although it is true that Collins has leveraged her power as a senior senator to gain additional funds for Maine projects, this money is insufficient to compensate for the huge losses in funding from Medicaid and Medicare cuts or from economic catastrophes wrought by the war in Iran.
I believe Mainers can best stop Donald Trump from creating further disasters by voting for Troy Jackson and ensuring a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate in the upcoming election.