As Mitch McConnell has secured the votes in the Senate to move forward with a rigged impeachment trial without a deal to include witnesses, let me preface the following op-ed with a Collins quote from Politico that Senator Schumer is out for her job, and not her opinion on trial proceedings.
“I don’t think Chuck Schumer is very interested in my opinion since he’s just launched a website in Maine and just committed an additional $700,000 in additional negative advertising from the Majority Forward PAC,” Collins groused about Democrats’ drive to deny her a fifth term in November. “I don’t think he’s really very interested in doing anything but trying to defeat me by telling lies to the people of Maine. And you can quote me on that.”
So the following is what a “thoughtful” Senator Susan Collins — who often gives the public a hint that she gives pause before voting a predictably Republican line — has decided on two big issues: the impeachment trial, and Trump’s war powers.
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There is no deader horse to beat in the gutters of Blogistan than Susan Collins’s endless fandango with her amazingly malleable political conscience. Entire generations, it seems, have been born and gone to dust in the time it takes for Collins to make up her mind and come to the usually inevitable conclusion that she’s a Republican and, therefore, crazy. If Collins were a weathervane, she’d spin so fast that the entire roof of the barn would come off and sail away across the landscape.
On Tuesday, though, we may have had a masterclass in Collinsology. She took entirely predictable dives on two major issues involving the president* who so often gives her great cause for Serious Concerns. First, she’s decided, along with the slightly less predictable Lisa Murkowski, to line up with Mitch McConnell’s effort to short-circuit the impeachment trial in the Senate. Collins followed that up with a characteristic bit of forelock-tugging on the question of whether the president* can make war on Iran on his own. It is an altogether remarkable parlay of cowardice masquerading as thoughtfulness.……..
Follow the rest here at Esquire.